Techniques to easily disable flash in Firefox and IE

I get asked quite often about how to temporarily disable flash in Firefox and IE. Although there are Firefox Add-ons like Adblock and Flashblock, these don’t actually deactivate the plugin. They simply replace flash elements with static elements. For testing purposes its important to understand exactly what users without flash will see. With that in mind, here are two techniques I use to quickly disable the flash plugin in Firefox 3 and IE 7.

Firefox 3: Disable flash plugin

Disable Flash in Firefox 3

Firefox makes it very easy to disable any browser plugin. Simply go to Tools->Add-ons->Plugins. Select “Shockwave Flash” from the list of plugins and click the disable button. Thats it. No need to restart. When your ready to activate flash again simply follow the same steps. Screenshot not good enough for you?

Internet Explorer 7: Toggle Flash

Toggle Flash

Toggle Flash is a toolbar button that executes a script to temporarily disable flash in the browser. Again, no need to restart. Click the button and flash is disabled. When your ready to re-enable flash just click the button again. There is one quirk in that it dosent have any sort of visual feedback on whether flash is enabled or disabled. You sort of have to just remember. Regardless its a simple and very useful tool.

Toggle Flash Toolbar Button

By Larry

Comments

Maynard September 8th

There is one quirk in that it dosent have any sort of visual feedback on whether flash is enabled or disabled. You sort of have to just remember. Regardless its a simple and very useful tool.

Thats not a quirk, its a screwup, like IE always was and always will be. Nobody with any sense is going to program something good for IE, its so fucked up its a joke! Why try to add gold to a tin mug?

People who know what they are doing and have time will always use Firefox. People with less time will use Opera. Both are superb browsers that make IE look sick.

The alternative is Chrome, but we all know that Google is bent on world domination, so we know that we can’t trust Chrome. It probably feeds back all we do on the net to Googles enormous databases. Will they guarantee it is clean? Nope! Why?
Canvas October 29th

Thanks for the insight on how the third party add-ons work.
Paul April 15th

Thanks very much. so simple. People going on about downloading third party stuff and all sorts.
brian May 19th

Thanks! Flash on linux is a b****h on the cpu.
brill June 13th

good to know about linux
Alan Haynes July 17th

Thanks for the info – I love simple solutions.

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About Author

Larry

A certified PHP developer and architect living and working in Orange County California. Larry specializes in LAMP based platforms and focuses on a wide variety of leading edge web technologies including web service development, AJAX enabled applications as well as Flash based application development.