I recently upgraded my web browser to the latest version of Camino. Looking through the preferences for a way to turn off the spellchecker (story for another time), I found an option to block Flash.
I love this! Many websites are loading much more quickly. I don't get distracting motion in my field of vision. It saves me time and bandwidth.
For example, I had one site that sends me an email every week, inviting me to listen to the answer to a business question. Often, I'm interested in the answer. But if I went to the site, the Flash would swamp my browser. I had to walk away from the computer, go check the land mail, get a glass of water, stretch for a minute or two. Then, when I came back, maybe the audio would be ready to play, and maybe it wouldn't.
All because the site designer put a rotating question mark in the margin of the page, and chose an inelegant solution for providing the audios. Completely useless.
Now it loads at a more reasonable pace. I've listened to more of the audios, now that I don't have the hurdle of a long wait keeping me from them.
What if I want to see a piece of Flash animation? No problem! Camino puts a button where the Flash goes. I can click on it, and then the Flash plays. Always at my choice.
It's the evolution of the web, become as useful and reasonable as pop-up blockers and anti-spam email filters.
Camino is a Mac browser from the Mozilla group. We're running it very happily under Mac OS 10.3.9 If you run something else, I'm sure you can find someone who can advise you on what would work for you.
May you have great control of your virtual environment.
1 comment:
Along similar lines, I recently discovered the NoScript extension for Firefox, which lets you permit Javascript, Java, and Flash on a site-by-site basis. I'm in love. I used to leave the "Enable Javascript" preference off all the time, except when I was using one of the relatively few sites that really need Javascript, but I had to remember to manually turn it on and off as needed. Many sites load and render faster, especially if they aren't allowed to pull in annoying Flash ads, and I have both the security of leaving Javascript off by default and the convenience of having it automatically enabled for those sites I am willing to trust.
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