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August 25, 2005
Firefox Flash Blocker
I accept fully that many sites, including some I run, need advertising to operate. My Wi-Fi Networking News site has Flash ads on it right now, for instance. But I am, unfortunately, finding that Flash ads are now frequently highly intrusive even on sites I trust. They cycle endlessly. They use visual pows to knock my eyeballs on the floor. They play audio without my permission.
Since Flash is not under my control, I have to take a stronger action and use FlashBlock, a simple Firefox plug-in that loads Flash, but doesn’t play it, putting a replacement symbol in its spot that, when hovered over, changes to a play button. This means that I’m back in control of my attention, sound, and browser.
If it catches on, it’s another reason for IE users to switch to Firefox, and it will probably reduce the response rate on Flash ads, thus moving advertisers to other mechanisms.
Now I just need a tool that blocks the almost year-old JavaScript-based popup ads that defeat ad blockers. They use JavaScript to write parts of the popup script, which requires some simulation to test—that is, the browser would need to run the script in a sandbox, analyze its output, and then use that to decide whether to kill the popup.
Posted by Glennf at 7:06 PM | TrackBack
August 20, 2005
Ben Turns One
We took a little vacation to celebrate Ben’s first birthday this last week. He’s got a handful of words like tree, boat, book, truck, and train (all b’s and t’s, it seems), and he’s nearly walking. He’s a delight.
Posted by Glennf at 11:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack