noscript

I've been using the flashblock Firefox extension for a long time. There's nothing more annoying (to me) than going to a Web site littered with a bunch of flash movies which slow the page load, distract me from the important content, or crash my browser. The flashblock extension replaces each flash movie with a link you can click to enable that flash movie, allowing you to enable only the individual movies you want to view.

The noscript Firefox extension disables all JavaScript in your browser. You can temporarily or permanently whitelist Web sites in noscript, allowing JavaScript from the sites you trust. This is a good idea: just start reading some of the stuff at Planet Websecurity if you need convincing.

Unfortunately, the two extensions are incompatible, because flashblock uses JavaScript to replace the movies (and noscript disables JavaScript). Until this week, I'd chosen flashblock over noscript, because my annoyance with flash exceeded my fear of JavaScript. I really can't defend that decision. shrug

But this week I took another look at noscript and discovered that noscript can disable flash in the same way that flashblock does. Looks like the developer(s) added that feature in version 1.1.0 (August 2005). Guess it's been that long since I'd tried noscript (or else I didn't look at the feature list very well). Anyway, I've switched to noscript.