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Disabling Flash in the Browser? 54

Posted by Cliff from the squelching-the-annoying-animations dept.
fishdan asks: "I know there are a few tools for selectively disabling flash in IE, but there is currently nothing in Mozilla. I'm wondering how many people have just removed Flash (as I have) by deleting the appropriate files? I find it greatly enhances my web experience, and on the very few cases when i think there is something worth seeing in Flash, I'll check it out on someone else's computer. I know someone is working on a 'disable flash from this site' for Moz X.x.x, but I'm wondering what people are doing now? I'm also actively advising people I know to remove Flash because of the lack of control for it on the users end. Short of deleting Flash, there's nothing uses can do to to stop those irritating ads. I don't mind the moderate ones, but the excessive ads are enough for me to throw the baby out with the bath-water."
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Disabling Flash in the Browser? More

Disabling Flash in the Browser?

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  • Just disable it (Score:5, Informative)

    by itwerx ( 165526 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:32PM (#4614102) Homepage
    Under the applications screen in your preferences. Flash is listed along with every other file that uses an external app. Just delete the association completely or edit the properties to prompt before running.

    Am I missing something here?

  • "I find it greatly enhances my web experience" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:35PM (#4614119) Journal
    Funny, that's what Macromedia told me to get me to INSTALL flash!

    To answer your question: yes I deleted flash. When I need to see something done in flash, I load up MSIE. (Hell, it's already loaded in memory anyway, might as well use it for something.)

    I am of the opinion that the annoying flash ads are going to be what eventually "does-in" Flash. As soon as Mozilla makes it easy to deal with it -- and it will if people want that -- then say goodbye to our annoying, animated friend.

  • File me under flizame (Score:5, Funny)

    by JohnLi ( 85427 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:36PM (#4614123) Homepage
    Just use Lynx. That way you don't have to put up with those pesky "graphics" either. Plus, it probably runs like a champ on your 386. :) doh.
  • With great dilligence I avoided allowing Flash to install itself on my primary Windows machine. Then one day my brother came over with a friend, and five minutes later his friend had installed Flash so he could see the cheesy entry page to some mountain bike vendor charging $200 to the negative gram. Good work Dale, you made my virus of the month club. Actually, I'm not sure whether Dale is a virus or a trojan or a worm.

    I figure there's no hope for Flash ever becoming as useful to the end user after installation as it is before installation. Flash uninstalled is the easiest method of all for eliminating tons of obnoxious anti content.

  • Junkbuster? (Score:5, Informative)

    by J'raxis ( 248192 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:44PM (#4614154) Homepage
    If you use JunkBuster, add this to the blockfile:

    /*.*\.swf

  • Finding out the domain where the Flash is coming from then blocking it in my host file (i.e. 0.0.0.0 ads.doubleclick.com) Certainly not foolproof and it does take a little bit of work on your part but it usually works pretty good on sites I frequently visit.

    One big disadvantage though is that if the Flash ad is coming from the same domain you want to visit, you can't block it or you won't be able to view the site.

    You could also download a proxy to run on your machine and set it up to block Flash or specific URLs that point to a Flash ad. Again, this my be more work than you want to do.

  • Here's my solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by hawkstone ( 233083 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:48PM (#4614182)
    I completely agree. I hate flash. I didn't install it for the longest time, but there's just too much out there, so I gave in.

    However, I have a solution. I found these wonderful little "bookmarklets" that work in mozilla. Find them here [squarefree.com].

    They are little javascript things that remove annoyances from pages, including blink text, javascript, embedded event handles, and even colored backgrounds and text, and background music.

    The one you want is called "zap embeds". It will kill all flash from the page you are looking at, leaving almost everything else intact. You can also use the vanilla "zap" which zaps Flash and some other stuff.

    I personally put a few of these in my personal toolbar. It's the first good use I found for that toolbar. Thus, one click away from killing flash on any page!

    IMHO, the perfect solution. Whoever wrote these is my saviour. Everyone should get these. :)

  • Removed the library (Score:2, Informative)

    by Chacham ( 981 )
    Just like you, I removed the library file. However, if you'd like to turn it on and off, I'd suggest a simple solution. Rename the library (maybe libflash.so ?). Then, when you find a page where you want it to work, add a symlink to the library.

    After I removed the file, I found that in most cases I didn't want or need it. If the few cases where I did, I just used netscape instead of my uisual mozila.
  • Personally, I don't bother. I just use one of
    the many ad-blockers out there.
    Proxomitron in my case.
    It intercepts the flash, and replaces it with a hyperlink. Makes it easy in the rare event I need to view the flash (some online catalogs, the occasional game, etc.).

    And before anyone bitches, I don't block all ads, just the annoying ones, so I'm not taking advantage of a "free lunch". I can see the OSDN Self Serve Ad System banner just fine.

  • Privoxy (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    www.privoxy.org

    Privoxy will disable Flash. It will also let you add sites to a whitelist for the few sites that you do want to see flash on.

  • why the animosity (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Naikrovek ( 667 )
    why do you guys hate flash?

    they're working on making the back button work, and all the other things you guys whine about.

    Flash isn't that big of an annoyance for me. For me, annoyances are things like getting my car stolen, or getting into a fight.

    You guys that think Flash is annoying need to step back and have a look at things.
    • why do you guys hate flash?

      Check out washingtonpost.com: animated ads, including one from Mervis Diamonds that "breaks out" of the ad banner to obscure the article you're reading, when it first loads. Or the furniture ad that plays link a movie, making it annoyingly hard to read the article.

      Get Proxomitron, and filter it out. Find or write a filter to replace it with a link.
    • -666 annoying.

      flash makes it too easy for mr. x to open up large ads, or other totally annoying ads, over the whole goddamn page, or do just about anything else on your computer too.

      sure, it's 'handy' and 'easy'. but it's basically useless extra weight that more and more web-developers except to find on users computer, even though they don't even need it for their site. what good are some cyber motorbikes zooming around in a intro to motherboard manufacturers page? (why it's useless extra weight? most of the things that can be done with it can be done otherwise, especially what comes to the stupid ads, except then they would have to behave). more and more and more flash is used making the pages unreadable by trying to be intuitive, except that most of the time's nothing describes a link with content of bios updates better than "bios updates", or then the web-dev is just too ignorant that having 500kb of extra weight on basically 30kb page isn't that smart(now, i'm on a 100mbit-univ line so it doesn't really matter to me that much but it still takes extra minute or two to get past those flashy intros and find the real content.).

      only good 'content' i've seen done with flash are the occasional humorous web-cartoons.

      and it's been around, what, 4 years? imagine mozilla still trying to make back button working.
    • why do you guys hate flash?

      1. Because flash "artists" don't understand animation. They make you waste your time waiting for text to zoom across the screen and for images to slowly scale and for slow fades. That might work for TV viewers sitting on a couch, but someone sitting at a computer doesn't want to wait around.

      2. Because I don't want to see animated ads, and I don't want to hear ads either. Flash doesn't provide pause and mute controls, so I don't use Flash.

    • Re:why the animosity (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dhall ( 1252 )
      Flash won't let me middle mouseclick / control mouseclick to open up the appropriate link in another tab.

      Some of us are STILL on modem, since we're over 17500 distance from a CO, and the only available broadband is iDSL at over $100 / month.

      It's pathetic when ads are the majority of the bandwidth from a webpage. Websites like ESPN and CNN have become quite simply obnoxious. Some flash is good, "AdFlash" is just annoying.
    • I am on dial up. The plans I have availible to me are either limited time or limited download. So far I have not had any trouble finding what I want by going to a non flash site. It it was sensible and no ads maybe.

  • Homsar! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheDanish ( 576008 )
    What? And miss out on Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com], and, more importantly, Strong Bad e-mails [homestarrunner.com]? You're nuts.

    Personally, the last time I tried to install Mozilla, I had a harder time getting Flash ON it.

    No, I have nothing useful to contribute to this discussion. Carry on.
  • There's no Flash support on FreeBSD, but Mozilla works great!

  • This involves a restart but (Score:3, Informative)

    by jon787 ( 512497 ) on Thursday November 07, 2002 @01:44AM (#4614758) Homepage Journal
    I have a script that moves the flash plugins in and out of the mozilla plugin directory
  • How to uninstall the Macromedia Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control

    To manually uninstall the Macromedia Flash Player plug-in (Other browsers, Macintosh and Windows)

    1 Quit the browser.

    2 Locate the browser application folder on your hard drive.

    3 Locate the Plug-ins folder inside the browser application folder.

    For example, C:\Program Files\Netscape\plugins\ (Windows), HD:Applications:Netscape:Plugins (Macintosh), or /usr/bin/Netscape/plugins/ (Linux or Solaris).

    The exact location of plug-ins folder may vary depending on platform/browser.

    4 Locate the Macromedia Flash Player plug-in:
    On Windows, the plug-in is named NPSWF32.dll.
    On Macintosh, it is called Shockwave-Flash-NP-PPC or Shockwave-Flash-NP-68.

    On Linux and Solaris the Macromedia Flash Player consists of two files: libflashplayer.so and ShockwaveFlash.class.

    5 Delete the plug-in file.

    6 Restart the browser.
  • Just download and install privoxy [privoxy.org] It's available for both Linux and Windows, and it's based on junkbuster [junkbuster.com] but is much more powerful. The default settings will clear out 90+% of the banner ads and other distractions and you can fine-tune it to catch even more.

  • Cascading Style Sheets (Score:5, Informative)

    by MSittig ( 246604 ) on Thursday November 07, 2002 @02:37AM (#4614903) Homepage Journal
    Harness the power of CSS. In your Mozilla profile folder, insert the following code into the userContent.css file:
    embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"] {
    display: none !important;
    visibility: hidden !important;
    }
    This should instruct Mozilla not to load any Flash objects. Bingo.

    Taken from this thread in Mozillazine [mozillazine.org].

    -ms
    • What version of mozilla is this for?

      I am using version 0.9.4 and there are no .css files in my profile. I don't want a newer version was the last version that worked with my broker and banking.

  • I use two browsers: Mozilla for everyday browsing, and I fire up IE if I go to a site that requires Flash, Java, or JavaScript (and only if I trust the site and feel that viewing the site is worth the trouble).

  • Flash hogs /dev/dsp (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Spacelord ( 27899 )
    For me, the most annoying thing about Flash ads is that they lock up Mozilla if something else is using the sound device. (for example if I'm playing mp3s in xmms) Mozilla will just hang until I free the sound device, no matter if the flash ad is really using sound or not.
  • In Opera I just hit F12 p to disable plugins. Not great if you actually use other plugins, but it's easy enough to enable when you need it; otherwise just remove or redirect the swf MIME type entries in whatever browser you're using.

    Someone posted some CSS which should work in Gecko based clients and Opera (and probably others); just add it to your user stylesheet (Prefs -> Page Style -> My Style Sheet in Opera, userContent.css in your profile dir in Mozilla).

    You can use user CSS to kill a lot of other web based spam too - e.g. my anti-banner.css [aagh.net] nukes, you guessed it, banners. Opera still loads the banners with this, so it's a good choice if you want to support sites but don't want to see the spam :)
  • I've been using Flash for a while now, and there's quite a few things I like about it.

    Its programming language has evolved to something pretty nice these days. I find it a lot easier to seperate the frontend and the backend using flash than using html. (html/php mixes too much code and look, and PHP->XML->XSLT->HTML is ridiculous, and buys you very little. The only thing that kindof works is relatively simple templates)

    The only thing I don't like about it, is that it doesn't "gracefully degrade", I mean it's still too hard to expose the structure/content/flow like you can with html.

    On the other hand, if I try to do everything by the book using standard xhtml/css/js, for the more complicated things I spend ages getting things to look/react right in the different browsers I want to support (IE Mac&Windows>5, Mozilla, ...)

    The fact that Flash is completely vector based is also a major asset, now that there's such a wide range of resolutions in use. (everything between 800x600 and 1600x1200 is extremely common - if I create fixed-pixel content for 800x600 I can guarantee you it'll look too small in 1600x1200)

    If I compare html and flash on features and general usability, I'd score both almost evenly: they both have things going for them. As long as I need to create simple information based sites, I use html. The minute I need to make something more complicated like a "web app" I use Flash.

  • Disabling Flash on Mac OS X (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jpkunst ( 612360 ) on Thursday November 07, 2002 @12:15PM (#4617074)

    I went to /Library/Internet Plugins/ in the Terminal, and issued this command:

    chmod 600 Shockwave\ Flash\ NP-PPC

    Now the web browser is no longer allowed to access the Flash plugin. Simple, and good enough for me.

    JP

  • This has got to be the first *useful* ask slashdot in a really long time. It's the first one I'm actually saving, since theres lots of good responses to a problem I've always hated.

    To people who wonder why Flash is bad, or at least can be:

    * It gives the web developer way too much control over the user's screen, sometimes taking over the whole screen.
    * Rarely is used for anything useful, except for animations in my online chemistry course.
    * Is hard to temporarily disable, until this question was posted. Just do a google search on disabling flash. See how many hits will tell you how to do the exact opposite.

  • I created two shortcuts, and put them in my "Links" bar in IE.

    Flash Off:

    C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\regsvr32.exe C:\WinNT\System32\Macromed\Flash\swflash.ocx /u /s
    Flash On:
    C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\regsvr32.exe C:\WinNT\System32\Macromed\Flash\swflash.ocx /s

    You'll need to adjust your paths to fit your system...

  • I used to always install flash whenever I did reinstall (yup - using Windows).

    Then I philosophized about my use of flash. I found that none of the sites I regularly visit requires me to have flash installed to view contend. However many of the regular sites use flash in advertisement.

    "Hmmmm" was my first thought - "Is this the only reason that flash got installed in the first place ?". I removed the flash plugin and my browsing experience has become much better.

    Whenever I do come across a site that requires flash to view contend. I just leave the site. If the site doesn't provide HTML it ain't got enough for me.
  • wow. i made slashdot. anyway, i just wanted to point out that the tool linked to in the question DOES work for mozilla. it works for any browser that uses a plugin that can be deleted or renamed.

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