Do embedded flash movies and other items ruin your browsing experience? Do you find flash as contemptible as Enron? Do you want to stop Flash from loading during a browsing session, or from running down your battery? Well, welcome into your computing experience ClickToFlash. I found ClickToFlash on a whim while reading through blogs and forums about negative browsing experiences.
Am I anti-Flash? No, but most websites I frequent do not use significant amounts of Flash, if any, at any point. With all the buzz about Flash being a closed, proprietary Adobe product that does not play well with open source products, there is a growing number of groups looking to exclude Flash from their content.
I downloaded ClickToFlash to a new user account on my machine to make sure that installation would not adversely affect my primary user account. Installation was through the standard Apple installation/software installer routine. After installation I jumped in and found that the Flash items loaded without any difference. You need to restart the computer after installation to enable the plugin. After restarting, the loading time of web pages with Flash was much quicker since Flash is disabled until you actively click it.
The preferences for ClickToFlash can be entered by Control- (or Right-) clicking on the Flash window. From the contextual menu that pops up, you can select to load that specific Flash item on that one page, all Flash images on the page in question, and add the page you are on to the Flash whitelist.
On the main settings page, the options are laid out in a straightforward manner with the most important button of all: Uninstall ClickToFlash.
Normal Flash performance was seen in the behavior of the browser after allowing it to load. My testing was done in Safari 5.0.2. This is a worthwhile tool to add to your utilities to improve your browsing and computing experience.