14 DAY TRIAL // The web is becoming ‘richer,’ but some sites are taking this to extremes. Faced with a flood of ads or interactive elements that don’t add anything to the experience, many users chose to block any Flash content in their browsers.
For Google Chrome users, one way of doings this is installing the FlashBlock extension, a simple and slick solution to the problem. By default it blocks all Flash elements and you can enable any of them with a simple click.
At the same time, Chrome has been offering a built-in way of blocking all plugins, by default, buried in the “Content settings.” While the option was useful in a small number of cases, it interfered with regular browsing too much to be a viable solution for most people.
Google Chrome enables you to stop loading all plugin on all site. It’s one way of making browsing safer and it also frees up quite a lot of resources. But there are times when you actually want a plugin to load, to watch a particular video for example.
Unfortunately, there was no simple way to ‘turn on’ a plugin. You could whitelist the entire site or enable just the plugin you needed globally, but neither solution is optimal.
The latest Google Chrome dev channel release introduced a simple but great new feature, ‘click-to-play’ for any plugin. Basically, if you used Chrome’s content filtering options to block plugins, it enables you to bypass them on a case by case basis, with a simple click.
In practice, it works just like FlashBlock, click on the video or game you want and it loads the appropriate plugin just for that element. And since the functionality is built into Chrome, it means that plugins are blocked before they load so they don’t use any resources.
To block all plugins in Chrome click on the ‘Content settings’ button in the ‘Under the hood’ section of the Chrome options. Then select ‘Plug-ins’ and ‘Do not allow any site to use plug-ins.’
To enable the Click-to-play feature you need to run the latest Google Chrome 6.0.490.1 dev, or a recent Chromium build, with the ‘ --enable-click-to-play ’ command line switch.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.