If you’re like me when surfing the web, you probably want your pages to load as quickly as possible. Some of the biggest irritations I find on a lot of sites are huge Flash animations. They can be slow to load, chew up bandwidth, and are often pretty well useless. Some blogs also post a lot of videos from places like YouTube, and it can be a real pain to have several of them on the same page all opening at the same time.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could choose when you want a Flash animation on a page to play? Well - you can. Just install Firefox’s Flashblock add-on.

Flashblock blocks Flash animations from loading automatically. Instead, it puts a place-holder where the animation is that you can click on when you want the animation to load.

Flashblock allows you to white-list certain sites, so that Flash animations will play automatically when those pages load. It also has a toolbar button that enables you to disable/enable Flashblock with just one click.

I’ve found Flashblock to be one of the best Firefox add-ons I have ever installed. It is great for dial-up users who don’t want slow page load times due to big Flash animations, and broadband users - especially those on a capped plan - who don’t want extraneous Flash animations chewing up their valuable bandwidth.

The latest version of Firefox is v2.0.0.11. It fixes a few add-on incompatibilities that appeared in v2.0.0.10. If you have Firefox already installed, just set your browser to automatic updates to download the latest version, or do it manually via the Help menu. If you haven’t yet installed Firefox, then you probably don’t know what you are missing out on. The browser is fast, secure, free & has thousands of add-ons to make your web browsing experience even better. To install the latest version of Firefox just go to Get Firefox.

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The first sign of a nervous breakdown is when you start thinking your work is terribly important. - Milo Bloom
[tags]firefox,flashblock,macromedia,adobe,software,internet,browsers,open-source[/tags]