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Comment by Dirt_McGirt | Hacker News Reader

Great. Now if there was a flashblocker that actually works, maybe I could switch.

its built-in. scripts,cookies,flash,images,pop-ups all have built-in support to be blocked. you just turn them off and whenever a page blocks it, an icon will show up in the right end of the url bar. clicking that icon lets you manage the rights of that particular site.

I'm completely lost here. Are you saying this is built into Chrome without an extension? I've definitely never noticed anything like this. Got a post or link I can see somewhere?

Chrome -> Wrench menu ("Customize and control") -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Privacy -> Content Settings -> Plug-ins -> Disable individual plug-ins -> Disable Shockwave Flash.

If you're autoupdating Chrome, you have to get in a habit of checking the settings menu periodically for new stuff. Unlike the more mature FireFox settings menu, Chrome's is still getting additions.

Unless I'm missing something this isn't anywhere near the functionality of Flash Block. Flash Block puts a placeholder in the spot of any SWF file it would load, and then lets me click to load the file if I want to see it, or quickly whitelist the site if I always want it to be able to load flash.

This appears to be just be turning flash on or off globally (and not very quickly either). FF has that level of control out of the box as well.

Flashblock has been available for chrome for ages.

http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flash...

turn it off. then you can quickly whitelist each site as you get to it from the icon in the right of the url bar.

the only difference that i know between this and what you explained is the lack of a placeholder image.

If a site has one flash video I want to watch and a bunch a flash crap surrounding it that I don't want, it's nice to able to just unblock the video and not have to whitelist the entire site.

Thanks... this definitely works well enough for me. I definitely didn't expect the feature to be this accessible based on the menu settings.

Yes it doesn't offer all the functionality yet, but it will get better I'm sure.

And how do I turn it back on for the site I'm visiting?

Seconded. Can't find anything like this in the release version of the Mac build.

The FlashBlock extension works well for me. Give it a try:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoi...

It blocks like maybe 25% of all flash for me. Not adequate at all.

Something is wrong with your setup. I have been using that flash blocker for 2-3 months now and it blocks 100% flash objects for me both on mac and Windows, haven't tried it on Linux yet.

Well, I've tried it on Mac, Linux and Windows and it only blocks a minority of all flash files I've encountered. It seems especially bad with youtube and vimeo files embedded in blog posts.

In fact, I don't think it really can work in any real sense as an actual blocker since chrome doesn't provide an API for that. As I understand it, the best it can do is to remove the flash after the page has rendered.

There are at least 3-4 competing extensions on Chrome so I'm sure there's a variability in the quality of them. This one has worked well for me:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemki...

But what you've said is true, FF's FlashBlock has much better control over Flash because of the control it has via the API. Chrome doesn't offer the same level of control to extensions, so they're all just going rewrite the page on load. That's been good enough for me though.

The point of Flashblock and NoScript is security without sacrificing usability on trusted sites. Yes, it lets you ignore the Flash, but it doesn't actually protect you because the Flash is still loaded.

The best Flash-blocking extension is to just not bother installing Flash in the first place.

It comes preinstalled though.

I've found Privoxy to be a good ad- and flash-blocking solution for browsers that can't block well enough themselves.

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