Too Flashy

Oftentimes when I visit a web page, it's cluttered with animated ads that drive me crazy. As if that wasn't bad enough, they sometimes play music or other sounds without being asked to. I don't like web pages that make noise. The other thing I hate about many animated ads is that, as I'm scrolling down the page with my mousewheel, the page will stop when the mouse cursor reaches an ad, because the ad is now sucking up the mousewheel events that would have otherwise gone to the web page. Almost always, these ads are created in Flash.

I love some of the things you can do with Flash. There are lots of great little games and utilities that use Flash. The primary purpose of Flash, however, seems to be to create ads. If that wasn't the case, then Flash would have options to let the user decide when and where to allow Flash to run. But it doesn't, so you're at the mercy of every greedy, abusive, scum-sucking Flash developer. That is, unless you take back control.

I used to use a utility called NoFlash! to disable ads, but I had to restart IE every time I changed it, and I'm basically too lazy to want to do that. So I've switched to two different utilities that work better.

If you're using Firefox, my favorite Flash control is FlashBlock, which gives you great control over how and when Flash operates. And it's free!

If you're using Internet Explorer, the best I've found is FlashBang, which is also free, but not as powerful.

Just say No to Flash!


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Links