I hate ads. On the Internet, in the Paris Metro, on TV.
I hate Flash. I link to an occasional YouTube video, and yes, I even use Flash for my numerous music players, but it’s slow, it hogs ressources, especially so on the Mac.
Which is why I surf mostly ad-free, using Safari and SafariBlock, which tells me it has blocked 287,977 ads since I installed it a few months ago!!! That’s close to three hundred thousand ads I’ve been spared!!!
The author writes:
It is by design an imitation of Firefox’s AdBlock extension, written because I love AdBlock, but I prefer to use Safari on Mac OS X.
Well, I love you SafariBlock!
And yesterday, John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a link to ClickToFlash. It grays out every Flash element on a page. You can then click on any one box to load and play the Flash content you’re interested in.
You can also option-click on a Flash element to « whitelist » the enclosing site, should you always want to load its Flash content (which I shamelessly encourage you to do for this site and for 1 mot, 1 chanson)…
I actually stopped going to certain French news sites like 20minutes.fr or the NouvelObs because they added oodles of Flash content that takes forever to load, despite my excellent Internet connection, and sucks all the juice out of my ageing Mac. I can now (somewhat) enjoy them again.
I love you too, ClickToFlash!
To be fair, the free, (Mac-only) mozilla-based browser Camino does all this pretty much out of the box, but I prefer the way Safari renders pages, so I’m glad I no longer have to give anything up by using it.
Now that you know, fellow Mac user, may your Web surfing be less polluted.