Mind Poison

As I've said before, I don't have Flash installed on Firefox, because nothing good ever comes of Flash. It only leads to obnoxious movie previews and commercials making noise in your browser window while you're trying to read, or gigantic ads that obscure the page until you dismiss them. Well, almost nothing good comes of Flash. Occasionally, you want to check out Strongbad Email, or something like that. Then, it's too much trouble to bother, since you have to open IE, and deal with that whole unpleasant experience.

Well, the answer is Flash Click to View. This extension prevents every Flash object from loading, and instead replaces it with a play button. If you want to see a particular Flash movie, you just click the button. Otherwise, your browsing experience remains just as quiet and pleasant as if you didn't have Flash installed.

This was actually the first time I'd ever installed a Firefox extension, and I was pleasantly surprised. Firefox itself takes you to their extension repository, and a simple click on "Install Now" does all the work. It just tells you that you need to restart Firefox before it can take effect.

Similarly, installing Flash was easier than on IE. I really like the Firefox tells you that you don't have a viewer for a certain page object (with the yellow bar across the top of the page and the button that lets you get the viewer), but today I got to tell Firefox to load the Flash plugin. You never have to deal with Macromedia's site or an installer, or anything. Firefox hides the whole thing from you. All you need to do is agree to the license, watch the progress bar, and restart Firefox.

Incredible.