Flash is not being used just for videos, it is also used around the Internet for creating casual games, advertisements and pretty much anything that you can think of.

In spite of all the advantages of the Flash platform, the problem with flash is that other than Windows, it really doesn’t run well on any other platform. Flash is also a notoriously heavy user of your system’s resources.

If you’re a Linux or OS X user like I am, you can forget about timely updates and can also expect your browser’s memory and CPU usage to go through the roof if you like visiting flash heavy websites. In my opinion, that is reason enough to get rid of Flash.

So, what do you do if you’ve had enough of the flash advertisements and videos making an appearance on every website that you visit ?

You give ClickToFlash a try !

ClickToFlash is an extension for Safari on OS X that blocks Flash from appearing on any site that you visit. With ClickToFlash loaded, this is how a site using flash will look like.

So, what’s the great deal about ClickToFlash, you ask ? You could have gotten rid of flash by just removing the flash plugin, right ? And to block advertisements, there are already some excellent freeware out there.

Well, I agree, but with ClickToFlash you don’t have to remove the flash plugin and that is the flexibility that it provides. The flash plugin will not be loaded up with every page you view of YouTube, for example, but you can still see the flash elements on the web page, if you want to, by just clicking on the element. So, to start playing the YouTube video above you can just click anywhere inside the gray area and the video will start playing.

Infact, in the case of YouTube, ClickToFlash also gives you an option to view the higher quality the H.264 video stream using QuickTime instead of Flash. Just right click the inside the gray area and select the H.264 option.

Isn’t that awesome ?

But, if you’re a heavy flash user, the constant clicking required to view the content on all your favorite sites might annoy you a bit. In that case, ClickToFlash provides an option to add certain websites to a Whitelist.

A Whitelist is a list of all websites which ClickToFlash excludes from blocking. Adding a site to the Whitelist is easy too, just right click the flash element on the particular site and select the Add to Whitelist option, as you can see in the image above.

ClickToFlash will then add the site’s URL to it’s Whitelist and the next time you visit that site, you’ll be able to enjoy all flash content as if ClickToFlash never happened to you ! I can already see myself making use of this feature for atleast a couple of sites.

So, do you guys find flash videos and ads annoying ? Have you ever though of ways to get rid of them ?

Note: A similar plugin for Firefox is Stop Autoplay

One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Installation

If you have not installed Google Chrome (unstable), go to the Chromium dev channel and grab the respective deb file for your system (32-bit and 64-bit). Double click on the deb file to start the installation. The whole process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Check for Adobe Flash player

If you have previously installed the Adobe Flash Player in your system, you should be able to find the libflashplayer.so file in the /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer directory. However, if you have installed the Flash player via the ubuntu-restricted-extra package, the libflashplayer.so will be located at the /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin directory instead.

To find out where your libflashplayer.so is located, you might want to do a search in Nautilus.

If you have not installed Flash Player, run the command in your terminal to install it:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Installing the Flash plugin

Create a plugins folder in the Google Chrome directory

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Copy the libflashplayer.so file to the plugins folder.

sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Note: change the source path if your libflashplayer.so file is not located at other location.

Editing the Application menu

Right click at the Application menubar and select “Edit Menus”

Scroll down to find “Internet” on the left pane and select Google Chrome on the right. Click on the Properties button on the right side.

In the Command field, change the command to

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-plugins %U

Save and close all the windows.

The flash player should be working in your Google Chrome now.