Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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FlashBlock: prevent autoloading of Flash content

In the comments to my previous post, Scott Galloway noted that advertisements could be the only thing keeping some web sites afloat financially. I noted that I didn’t mind text ads or static images, but animated gifs and Flash ads had to go.

Well, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. FlashBlock is a Mozilla/Firefox extension that never loads Flash until you tell it to. From the web site:

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content.

Published Oct 21 2004, 10:40 AM by darrell

Comments

Jay Nathan said:

Does this work for ads that overlay static content like you might find on weather.com? I wonder how the placeholder might work in that case.

# October 21, 2004 7:54 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

it depends on how the ad works. If the ad is driven by actionscript/javascript from inside the flash file, then you probably won't see the ad at all since the flash file is never downloaded nor ran at all. If the flash simply plays or loops and is always present (like in a banner ad) then you'll see the static content with the placeholder over it. The placeholder is an outline and a round button in the middle, the rest is transparent so you can see what is behind it.

# October 21, 2004 9:16 AM