ClickToFlash
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Steve Jobs hates Adobe Flash and doesn’t want it on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad but that’s besides the point. I’ve been noticing that my computer has gotten increasingly unstable as my workday goes on. Later in the day (like now) typically the computer was running hot, fan on, Safari running slow and hanging at times (MacBook Pro 2.5GHz, 4 gigs RAM, System 10.6.2, Safari 4.0.4).
My friend Steve Splonskowski, a Macintosh developer and someone I trust was visiting and he had ClickToFlash running and claimed it helped by enabling the loading of Flash selectively. ClickToFlash is a Safari extension that creates both a ClickToFlash menu item in Safari and pull down menus on flash movies that allows selective loading of them. It’s clean, simple, and it works.
ClickToFlash has completely solved my computer’s overheating problem by keeping Flash at bay. I still watch movies with Flash but it doesn’t load automatically anymore, I have to load it where I want it. Loading it is simple and one can build a whitelist of sites where one wants it to load automatically, like Vimeo and sites like that.
Flash may or may not be evil but I now know how unstable it made my computer. Thanks Steve, and thanks ClickToFlash developers.
This is AWESOME Richard. Thanks!!
I’m so sick of flash that I had it on my todo list to remove from my mac(s) this week. This solved my problem. No more fan-frenzy!
Greg: I wasn’t sure what your feelings were about Flash, glad you could make use of this.
It is totally obvious why Jobs is on such a tear against Flash. I wasn’t sure what was killing my machine until I installed this software.
I’ve had it up to my ears with Flash for many years now, for the same reasons you mention in you post. It’s a resource hog. There’s definitely some nice sites that use flash but the problems out-weight the benefits for me.
I know a lot of people complain that it’s not available on mobile devices but if it does this to a machine with 4gb of Ram and a hefty processor imagine what it would do to a iPhone or iPad.
I also get tired of the music that people throw into their flash sites with a hidden toggle or no toggle to turn it off.