Flashblock Tutorial
Category: addons
A 2 Minute Read
Note: This article is now quite dated, as Flashblock is redundant. Mozilla Firefox contains ‘Click to Play’ functionality now for its Flash Player, which I now recommend.
Adobe Flash, the platform which brings graphics, video, animations, and even some applications to your browser, is ony of those unfortunate dinosaurs of the internet which won't go away. Of course, in some instances Flash can be great, such as Youtube. In other cases, Flash can be extremely exploitable. Luckily, Youtube is moving from Flash over to HTML5, so the future is looking a little bit brighter. Nevertheless, the internet is still littered with Flash content, some of it useful, some of it not. Fortunately while we wait for it to die out there is a handy add-on which allows us to enable Flash on demand.
After installation, there really isn't much to Flashblock. It's a dead simple add-on which everybody should use. It will make your browser more secure, and will decrease load times and overall bandwidth (because rich Flash graphics won't be downloaded). So give it a shot!
A 2 Minute Read
Note: This article is now quite dated, as Flashblock is redundant. Mozilla Firefox contains ‘Click to Play’ functionality now for its Flash Player, which I now recommend.
Adobe Flash, the platform which brings graphics, video, animations, and even some applications to your browser, is ony of those unfortunate dinosaurs of the internet which won't go away. Of course, in some instances Flash can be great, such as Youtube. In other cases, Flash can be extremely exploitable. Luckily, Youtube is moving from Flash over to HTML5, so the future is looking a little bit brighter. Nevertheless, the internet is still littered with Flash content, some of it useful, some of it not. Fortunately while we wait for it to die out there is a handy add-on which allows us to enable Flash on demand.
Flashblock
Flashblock is an add-on which, like NoScript, relies on a whitelist system, and disables all Flash content on webpages. So instead of having a page filled with Flash elements Flashblock simply replaces these with icons. If you want a Flash element to work simply click the icon to enable it. For example, if you go to a page that has 15 Flash elements and one of those elements is a video you want to watch, Flashblock will disable all 15 of them, leaving you a simple icon for you to click to enable the video. It's extremely quick and easy, and has only upsides. In fact, Flashblock allows you to whitelist Flash from an entire website. This is great for trustworthy websites like Youtube where you don't want to have to enable Flash for every video you watch.
After installation, there really isn't much to Flashblock. It's a dead simple add-on which everybody should use. It will make your browser more secure, and will decrease load times and overall bandwidth (because rich Flash graphics won't be downloaded). So give it a shot!
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