December 11, 2010

ClickToFlash

I don’t know if Adobe Flash on a PC is as much of a CPU drain as it is on a Mac, or even if there is an equivalent plug-in for a PC, but last night I installed ClickToFlash, and our laptop is running quick, fast, and quiet. It’s amazing how one piece of software can be so poorly written, and so ubiquitous, as to make every action on a computer feel equivalent to swimming in quicksand.

When you install the plug-in, flash video looks like this:

Simply click the image, though, and play the video you want. No annoying Flash video ads taking over an entire web page you are trying to read, ever.

posted by in shouldness, software | * | 10 comments 

comments

  1. Phil Bebbington on December 11th, 2010 at 11:15 am

    There is an addon for Firefox in windows called flashblock which seems to do pretty much the same thing!

  2. Deron Bauman on December 11th, 2010 at 11:22 am

    I can’t believe how fast the computer is now.

  3. Sheila Ryan on December 11th, 2010 at 11:54 am

    I’m going to install ClicktoFlash right now. Thank you, Deron.

  4. KevinQ on December 11th, 2010 at 12:56 pm

    The best part of blocking flash is that some websites use flash as a hard-to-block tracking cookie. I don’t know what comes up with ClickToFlash, but with flashblock, if there’s a flash cookie on a page, I get a flashblock arrow in the upper corner of the window.

    K

  5. Coop on December 11th, 2010 at 9:33 pm

    It’s all safe and everything?

  6. Kelsey Parker on December 12th, 2010 at 10:33 am

    Thank you, Deron! Downloaded. I am excited to witness the difference.

  7. Deron Bauman on December 12th, 2010 at 10:39 am

    Night and day. It’s like suddenly the computer works again.

  8. walt on December 12th, 2010 at 9:46 pm

    On a pc it depends. My garden variety desktop from last year can handle Flash no problem. My 3 year old notebook, on the other hand, wants to curl up and die sometimes – especially when running Chrome, my favourite browser.

    Anyway, I just installed a Chrome extension called FlashBlock that behaves in a very similar way to what you described. My profound thanks as the notebook is far more useful now browsing, and I will now go bang my head repeatedly despairing on the fact I never thought of this for the last couple years.

  9. Jon Williams on December 13th, 2010 at 12:43 pm

    If you’re running a version of the Flash Player less than 10.1, do yourself a favor and upgrade. The performance difference vs 10.0 et al is nothing short of remarkable. (Full disclosure: I am a longtime professional Flash developer)

  10. Patrick Burleson on December 14th, 2010 at 2:54 pm

    I’ve been using John Gruber’s setup: No Flash installed at all and using Chrome when I absolutely need to use it. ( Chrome for the Mac ships with its own copy of Flash )

    http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_with_google_chrome

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