Comments on: Taking control of the Flash player

By: Brian Tkatch

Brian Tkatch — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:06:55 +0000

Oh my, i do the same thing with FF and IE. :)

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » A sign of life from the CML working group

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:46:49 +0000

[...] a recent entry on this blog I remarked that “apparently restaurant owners are easy preys for incompetent Web [...]

By: Outtanames999

Outtanames999 — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:43:56 +0000

Flash technology is attractive, entertaining and compelling - and even makes ads worth watching. So I believe blocking Flash is not the long term solution. Instead Adobe needs to step up to the plate and make its Flash plugin as user friendly as other contemporary web technologies.

For example, consider the options you have when right-clicking on almost any other web page object. Options like view source, save to the local machine, copy/paste, create a shortcut, etc. None of these are available for Flash objects.

It is time for Adobe to open up its platform to give users more control and more options and abandon the Shockwave CDrom interface mentality where the “developer knows best” what the user wants.

The truth is, no one knows what the Flash app is doing, and it’s doing it without our permission or control. That’s got to change.

By: David M. Besonen

David M. Besonen — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 17:41:36 +0000

thanks for that suggestion William–some type of work-around is better than nothing.

one other thing would be nice and that you be a way to prevent folks from downloading the flash player to firefox. i suppose this might best be accomplished by blocking adobe.com’s ip address range. that seems like it would be a lot easier than attempting to block the pop-ups telling folks they need to install the flash player, no? do you have any other ideas about how to accomplish this?

By: Jack Stewart

Jack Stewart — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 15:07:53 +0000

Thank for your solution to a long standing annoyance. One suggestion - because Adobe’s Flash uninstaller removes the player from all browsers you might want to vist the following mozilla site page for instructions on removing the player from Firefox only.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Flash_(Firefox)#Windows_uninstall

Jack

By: tobozo

tobozo — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 14:28:01 +0000

Flashblock is a good complement : http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

This won’t be 100% effective (buggy DOM support) but will be better than nothing on machines where Firefox+Flash is installed.

Combine it with a personal Adblock filter, and whitelist whatever page you need to have flash content executed in just one click.

I just don’t understand how using MSIE rendering engine to display potentially vulnerable flash content is more secure than using Sunbird or Opera (supported by IETabs as well), or even Firefox itself.

There is no addon such as AdBlock for MSIE, and the one installed in Firefox doesn’t have any effect in IE Tabs, so when you switch to MSIE rendering engine, you dramatically decrease the security level by enabling ads (thus exposing the system to virus threats and the user to brain damage;).

By: Gena01

Gena01 — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:26:58 +0000

You should try FlashBlock add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433

By: Carey

Carey — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:23:40 +0000

Make your life easier:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Works like a charm!

By: David Grambinoccino

David Grambinoccino — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:47:06 +0000

Kludgy.

Why not just use this?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433