I love it! I just installed the Flashblock extension to Firefox 2.0 and what a difference it makes! What it does is simple... on a web page that has Flash elements in it, the Flash components are NOT loaded, i.e. they don't start playing automagically. Instead what happens is you get a box where the Flash component would be with a little icon in the middle of the box. Move your mouse over the icon and it turns into the > icon for a "Play" button. Click it and the Flash component is loaded and plays. Why do I like it so much?

IT RETURNS CONTROL of my web browsing experience to ME!

As Flash has become more common, web designers have used Flash to add all sorts of functionality to web sites. Now, some of that functionality has been excellent. For instance, the stats I get from LibSyn are delivered via a Flash component and it works wonderfully well. But in many cases, Flash is being used just to add animation, sounds, ads or other annoying effects to web sites. Now... problem solved... I don't see those Flash animations unless I want to do so! In fact, Flashblock solves a number of problems:

• It eliminates the usually-annoying music that slams you when you visit some web sites (at least, those that are using Flash-based players).
• Pages load MUCH faster! Because they are not downloading and playing 50 zillion embedded components, movies, etc., etc. (Kind of brings me back to the days when loading images slowed everything down so we loved browsers that gave us the option to NOT download images.)
• Bad flash programming can break browsers. Just this morning, Internet Explorer 7 crashed on me with an error about the Flash player having some problem with the Flash animation on one of the pages I was viewing. Crashed. With no nice "Restore Session" feature like Firefox 2 has. But in recent days, I've had Firefox jack my CPU to 100%. After much disgnosis (and many uses of the wonderful "Restore Session" feature after killing the process), I went through the painful process of going through each browser window shutting down tabs to see which one was causing the problem. Unfortunately, I started going too quickly and when the CPU dropped I had just killed off several tabs very quickly... but all of those tabs had had Flash components on them. Notes in online user forums show that other people are finding the same issue with FF2. (In fact, one of them was what pointed me to Flashblock.)

One note on this last point... I don't view it as the Flash technology that is the issue... it is the poor programming of that technology that is probably to blame. There are bad programmers in every language out there.

Now, Flashblock is not without its issues. When I went to LibSyn to try it on the stats animation there, when I clicked the Play icon, nothing happened. I had to right-click the component, choose "Allow Flash from this site", and then reload the page. The nice thing is that Flashblock does have a whitelist, so you can add sites where you need to use Flash-based components.

I'll have to see if there are any more issues as I start to use it, but the key for me is that I am back in control of my web browsing experience, instead of simply having to put up with whatever Flash-based doodads various web designers felt they had to foist on me... (Can you tell I'm a fan of minimalist site design? Give me the info I want... as fast as you can...)

Of course, this does raise the question - if your web site is entirely in Flash, what will my user experience be when I first visit your site? Will I actually click the "Play" icon to see your website? Or will I just go somewhere else where I don't need to do so? :-)

Tags: adobe, firefox, flash