Control Flash in Firefox with Flashblock

Browing the Web these days can be an annoying, frustrating place.  First there are pop-up ads, although those are generally stopped by most modern browsers, assuming you’ve turned on the pop-up blocking feature.

Then there are all the annoying, flashing advertisements and videos and music players that start playing the second you load a website.  And finally there are all the advertisement agencies and tracking companies that watch your every move.

It’s a trigger for paranoia, no doubt, but thanks to some common Firefox add-ons, we can take charge of our browsing so we see the websites we want to view, and nothing else.

In this article we’ll talk about Flashblock, a simple extension that uses the brute force option of simply turning off Flash until we say to turn it back on.

What Does Flashblock Do?

Flashblock does exactly what it says: it blocks Flash content.  Not just the ads… all of it.  Other extensions (like Adblock Plus, which we’ll talk about at a later point), attempt to allow some instances of Flash, like embedded videos, while blocking others that the extension assumes are advertising.

Flashblock will have none of that, and just blocks everything.  As mentioned, this is a pretty brute force technique, and has the downside of blocking some websites where you want the Flash to run.  This includes YouTube and other audio/video content you want to see, but it’s only a click away, even after Flashblock stops it from loading.

Installing Flashblock in Firefox

To install Flashblock, search for it on the Firefox Add-ons website, or go directly to its page.

To install, simply click on the big green Add to Firefox button.  A new window will appear, wanting you to verify you wish to install this extension.

Go ahead and click the Install Button, then restart your browser.

Configuring Flashblock

To configure Flashblock (and all your extensions), first go to the Tools menu and select the Add-onsoption.

Next, select the extension you want to configure.  Here we are about to edit the Flashblock settings.

Flashblock is a pretty simple extension to configure.  You can turn it on or off from the On/Off tab, as well as having it block Microsoft Silverlight content as well.

The Whitelist tab allows you to create a list of websites that Flashblock will ignore.  This is nice for YouTube and Hulu, websites where you are going there specifically for the Flash content!

Now, when you go to a website that includes Flash content – we removed Vimeo from our whitelist for this example – you’ll see this:

You can tell there is something missing because of the Flash logo in the middle of the large black space.  To turn on Flash for that part of the page, simply click the logo and the content will load.  Simple!

From now on, thanks to Flashblock, Flash content is under your control.  Nothing will load unless you tell it to.