Flashblock – Moon of Alabama

May 10, 2005

Flashblock

Some weeks ago I was experiencing problems with the Washington Post website. Smooth scrolling of pages was impossible. My keyboard and mouse seemed to work only with short interrupts.

Testing around a bit I found that a specific Xerox advertisement on the WaPo site was the reason for my problems. That ad was programed with Macromedia’s Flash
tool and it did steal enough computing cycles on my PC to delay other functions,
like my mouse movements and the page scrolling.

For a long time, the download speed of a web-page was the number one concern of web-programmers. The website managers often struggled with the advertising sales people to restrict the size of advertisements. Every additional byte to download will slow a page and will drive away readers they argued. It took some time, but the argument is now accepted.

But the problem has changed. It is not the size of the ads that is problematic, but the computing resources an ad uses on the local PC.

Many advertisements are now small programs, displaying some movement, changing colors or playing some sound. Usually they are developed with Macromedia’s Flash tool. The web-browser includes a little virtual engine, the Flash player, that does process such Flash programs and display their results within the web-page. This is stealing computing power on the local machine. Like with over sized web-page, the only way to turn the current trend to more "flashy" ads is to boycott them. If we all do this, the ad folks will return to something reasonable.

Flash programs are useful for some stuff like interactive election maps or Jib Jab comics. To permanent disable Flash in your browser, is therefore not the preferable solution.

For users of the Firefox web-browser there is some help available. (If you still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, please change to Firefox. It´s simply a much better browsing product and it’s free. You can download it here.)

Flashblock is a little addition to the Firefox browser that blocks the execution and display of Flash content – be it advertisement or something else. Instead of the Flash programs results, a small button is displayed. You can always decide to view the Flash content by clicking that button. Useful Flash content is thereby still accessible, while unreasonable "flashy" ads are not displayed anymore.

A very useful tool for a better surfing experience. The download page is here.

Posted by b on May 10, 2005 at 10:41 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Firefox rules, no question.
OT, but relevant to recent MoA discussions:
Huge radioactive leak closes Thorp nuclear plant:
A leak [on 19 April 2005] of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant.
The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter. …
The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup of redundant nuclear facilities. …
The Thorp plant produces uranium and plutonium from spent fuel in such large quantities that only a tiny proportion of it can ever be reused for reactor fuel. Its critics also claim it is uneconomic because it has never operated to design capacity since it opened 12 years ago, and is years behind schedule in fulfilling orders.
This has angered some customers and the British Nuclear Group is embroiled in a court case with one of its customers, the German owners of the Brokdorf power station, which is withholding fees of £2,772 a day for storage of spent fuel, claiming it should have been reprocessed years ago.
In 12 years Thorp has reprocessed 5,644 tonnes of fuel from its first 10-year target of 7,000 tonnes. Last year it failed to reach its target of 725 tonnes, achieving 590.
The suggestion is that news of the leak was suppressed during the recent UK election campaign so that nuclear power would not become an election issue. Stories about the leak have only started to appear in the past few days.
Plus Inuits go legal vs the US on climate change:
I stand on the edge of a region which the Inuit people call “Auyuittuq” which means “the land that never melts”. Well, melting it is. Scientists reckon the winter temperature has gone up by 4 degrees in the last 50 years and they’re projecting it could go up another 7 degrees over the next 100 years, with potentially devastating consequences for wildlife and the people who live here.

Posted by: Dismal Science | May 10 2005 11:07 utc | 1

b, thanks for the goodies on Firefox.
Here’s Blair trying to be Bush:
“Blair Demands Nuclear Power to Protect High ‘Living Standards’ ”

His remarks infuriated the Green movement: Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace, said: “He is implying that anyone who is against nuclear is in favor of making people go back and live in caves. It’s absolutely ridiculous. He is saying he is not asking anyone to make any choices to protect the living standards of children in the future.”

Posted by: beq | May 10 2005 12:48 utc | 2

Oh, universe, please let Blair go away as soon as possible. His waste of his talents pisses me off more every day.
He could have lead, he could lead, but instead he follow opinions polls even when a lame duck. Blair knows better, that’s the worst thing about him.

Posted by: Colman | May 10 2005 12:55 utc | 3

You should also check out AdBlock, another Mozilla/Firefox plugin that gives you very flexible blocking tools. It allows regular expressions to act on the different HTML elements, so you can block IFRAMES, EMBED and images.
Just adding the following rules handles 99% of ads that I’ve seen: */ad/*, */ads/*, */adv*, *doubleclick*, *servedby* and */banner/*. In the case of the WP website, the */ad/* regular expression covers four of the ads, and the */adv* one hits another five.
You can click on the “Adblock” icon in the bottom right of the status line to view the blockable elements in the current document and create new filters on the fly.

Posted by: Bill Gates | May 10 2005 15:49 utc | 4

@Bill – thanks for the tip.
Remember a few years ago when we saw each other in Settle? You did give a presentation on Windows NT server as the ultimate operation system for my company when your powerpoint application crashed. I guess you have changed to open office by now.

Posted by: b | May 10 2005 16:07 utc | 5

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