Firefox and the Flash Plugin

Firefox is my web browser of choice. By itself, it's a best-of-breed web browser. With a set of carefully chosen plugins, it simply can't be beat.

However, there's one plugin I refuse to install on Firefox, and that's the Flash plugin.

It's not that I have anything against Flash itself. It's a fantastic tool which can make beautiful, media rich web pages. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, it's used for a more nefarious purpose: to inundate you with obnoxious ads. The ads usually bounce, jump, shake, and flash (pathetic pun intended) until you're either annoyed enough to close your web browser entirely, or until you're started having an epileptic seizure.

My plan of attack to handle this situation is simple: I don't install the Flash plugin on Firefox. On those occasions when I need to visit a Flash enabled web site for a legitimate reason, I use Internet Explorer instead, where I've installed the Flash plugin. (And, in fact, I don't leave Firefox to do it. I simply use the IE Tab plugin for Firefox to use Internet Explorer right inside Firefox!)

There's one slight flaw in the plan, though. Every single time I visit a web site with Flash ads, which is way too many of them, Firefox displays the following message at the top of the web page:

Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page.

Perhaps I'm just too sensitive, but that message drives me nuts. Sure, it's a lot less annoying than looking at obnoxious Flash ads, but it's still annoying. I purposefully avoided installing the Flash plugin on Firefox to avoid annoyance.

Luckily, there's a work-around. Open a new tab, browse to about:config, and type plugin.default_plugin_disabled into the Filter field. Right click the one and only attribute that should then be displayed, and Toggle the value to false. Restart Firefox, and...voila! No more annoying messages about additional plugins being required.

Happy browsing!