A Facebook conversation this week reminded me that many people do not know how damaging Adobe Flash can be on many systems, especially, it seems, those running Apple’s OS X. For many years, I have found Flash more annoying than anything, and so have run various plug-ins to keep Flash from loading in my browsers. There are also an additional mini-application that you may find useful.
First, there are a number of Flash blocking plug-ins for the various browsers available. For Firefox, there’s FlashBlock. Ffor Safari there’s ClickToFlash. For Google Chrome, there’s Kill-Flash. All of these plugins do the same thing: they replace the Flash elements on a page with a clickable image. If you don’t click, no Flash ever loads. If you do, Flash loads and plays.
One think I especially like about ClickToFlash is that you can adjust the settings to load H.264 videos on YouTube instead of Flash when it is available. Very nice.
In addition to these plug-ins, I also use BashFlash on my Macs. This little application sits quietly in the menubar until one of the Flash processes starts going crazy. Sometimes, a Flash process can cycle up and take over a computer. When one does this, BashFlash wakes up, turns red, and lets you kill the runaway Flash process.
Together, these plugins and app will make your browsing experience much more pleasant. I run ClickToFlash and Kill-Flash on my two most-used browsers, and keep BashFlash on hand, too. Let me know how it goes for you.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi SSH,
Flash runs great on my computer, can you back up what’s specifically damaging about Adobe Flash. I run Mac, Linux and Windows (
I have a lot of computers – long story ) and Flash has been great. Flash Player 10 has been amazing.
I love a couple of things about my iPad, but I hate that when I go to great HTML5 RIA sites that the ipad hangs.
I don’t blame Apple, the iPad, HTML5, Web Sockets, Java Script, CSS, or the programmer, etc. the reality is that it is usually combination of a few things – we find these limits when we push the boundaries.
What specific issues are you running into? Perhaps I could help.
Thanks
-SR
Scott,
Many folks experience runaway Flash processes, especially on their Macs (and sometimes Linux and Windows). Flash is not a particularly well-behaved application, especially on the Mac, so many people that I know have contacted me about how to avoid these issues. I have experienced runaway Flash processes myself, although Flash 10 does seem to have improved that somewhat, since it was the first release to use hardware acceleration for H.264 video on the Mac.
Regardless, Flash has historically been very poorly behaved and a number of people continue to have issues with it, especially when they have many windows and tabs open in their browsers. That’s why I shared it with everyone.
Best,
ssh
Ah, I see.
Yes, if there is poor scripting on the programmers part this can happen.
Turning off Javascript is an option here too. With the increase in the adoption and implementation of scripted experiences on the web I’ve seen a lot more “long running script” errors due to poor JS.
It’s an interesting time, as we want more interactivity and power from the browser these types of issues will increase.
Is there an equivalent click to javascript, bashJS functionality in firefox and other browsers?
Thanks
-SR
Scott,
JavaScript is processed by the JavaScript engine in the browser (as an aside, the performance of the JS engine is one of the key differentiators between the different browsers’ performance). As a result, the exception handling of JavaScript (starting with version 1.5 back in the IE 6 days) should be used by JavaScript applications to address possible issues.
The JavaScript engines are responsible for managing the JavaScript, however, and some are better than others. I have appreciated the quality of the WebKit JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore) and its handling of errors and runaway processes. Firefox has a nice plugin in FireBug, as well.
Hope this helps you out!
Best,
ssh
Thanks ssh,
I was not aware that FireBug had a solution to kill JS scripts, I’ll check it out.
Thanks again
-SR
Scott… not so much “kill”, but you can certainly “pause” at any time: http://getfirebug.com/javascript