Stop Flash from Automatically Loading in Safari with ClickToFlash

Sep 24, 2009 - 8 Comments

click-to-flash I love the web, I hate Flash. I know this isn’t always a popular opinion, but for me it causes a lot of problems. It’s a slow bloated resource hog that makes browsing the web painful, loud, and obnoxious. Really the only time I actually want to use it is on video sharing sites like YouTube, when using Flash is MY choice and not some obnoxious web advertisers with a “Congratulations… blah blah blah” talking Flash ad blasting in the background, so annoying! Ok now that my rant is over… let’s get to the point and find a solution to this problem; what we really want to do is prevent Flash from loading without our permission, right?

Using the excellent ClickToFlash tool, you can stop Flash from automatically loading in the Safari web browser, instead you selectively allow Flash to load by ‘clicking’ to allow the plugin, thus the name Click-To-Flash, make sense? It’s absolutely awesome and a must-have for Mac users who need Flash sometimes but are frustrated with the overall achey experience that can be caused by erroneous flash players gone wild.

ClickToFlash gives you full control, allowing you to only load Flash when you want to. All you need to do is click on a clearly marked and disabled Flash region to manually enable it yourself just for that specific usage, on that specific web page, for that specific browsing session! That means no background Flash plugins going wild that you didn’t know about or didn’t approve, genius, right?!

Somehow I had never heard of ClickToFlash before, but one of our brilliant readers, Adam P, suggested using it and I am so glad that I gave it a try. So, are you sick of Flash getting in the way of your web experience when you use Safari? Then resolve the problem once and for all by trying out clickToFlash and save yourself a whole bunch of headaches, you’ll be glad you did. And don’t be surprised if Safari feels faster too, particularly for older Macs when the resource intensive Flash plugin can take up a lot of memory and CPU, win/win all around, right?

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Posted by: David Mendez in Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting, Utilities

8 Comments

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  1. Peter says:

    It does’t fix for me. I can’t find any icon of clicktoflash on my Chrome browser after install.

  2. […] you do have to use Flash for other reasons, it’s highly recommended to install a ClickToFlash plugin for Safari or enabling the included click-to-load Flash feature in Chrome, both offer the same […]

  3. […] playing Flash elements, games, and videos. The easiest solution for Mac users is to just install a Flash blocker plugin like ClickToFlash so that Flash files are not automatically […]

  4. Eth says:

    Flashblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433/) should do the exact same thing on Firefox.

  5. […] am a huge fan of ClickToFlash, the Safari plugin that prevents all Flash from loading unless you approve it. But what if you […]

  6. In a circle of tips/sharing, thank you for writing the article about Safari freaking out, which lead to me finding out about ClickToFlash in the Reddit comments for your article.

    Oh, and an infinite amount of thanks to the ClickToFlash dev for restoring sanity and stability to my web experience.

  7. haymoose says:

    I LOVE IT!!!! Great App!

  8. Reddddddditor says:

    Anything to stop Flash trash is brilliant, thank you so much

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