Blocking Flash in Chrome
December 6th, 2011 at 3:46 pm (Computers, Productivity, Web)
I have the Flashblock add-on for Firefox that allows me to selectively click to allow Flash to run when I want to, and otherwise nothing happens. This makes for a calmer, quieter, more enjoyable web browsing experience. (You can add permanent always-run exceptions for well behaved, regularly visited sites so that clicking-to-flash doesn’t get annoying.)
Lately I’ve started experimenting with Chrome, and I wanted to see if it had a similar add-on. There is a Google Chrome extension called FlashBlock, but it turns out that you don’t need to explicitly add this (or anything). Thanks to these instructions, I learned that all you have to do is:
- Type “about:flags” in a new browser window/tab. Scroll down to where it says “Click to play” and click “Enable.” Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Relaunch browser.”
- In your relaunched browser (took me two launches), go to Preferences (Cmd-,), click “Under the Hood,” click “Content Settings,” then scroll down to “Plug-ins” and select the “Click to play” radio button (which is not visible if you haven’t done step 1).
- Go to some Flash-y site like youtube.com and test it out. Nice!