Toggle Flash
“For distracting, crash-causing, or otherwise troublesome animated pages, Toggle Flash... soothes the pain pretty quickly.”—Kevin Purdy, Associate Editor, Lifehacker

“One thing we've noticed is that Flash... dramatically decreased battery life.  ...sufferers can use Toggle Flash.”—Jason Chen, Senior Associate Editor, Gizmodo

Note:  With the release of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), I no longer recommend the use of Toggle Flash for IE9 and the reasons for this are twofold.  One, Microsoft has removed the Command Bar by default and this is where the Toggle Flash button lives.  Two, Microsoft has truly realized the questionable quality of some add-ons, and how annoying they can be, and there is a new feature that works with these add-ons succinctly and, in some ways, better than Toggle Flash does.  The new feature is called ActiveX Filtering and I highly recommend everyone check it out.

Adobe’s Flash has become the industry-standard for creating interactive web sites and streaming video.  As such, it is used nearly everywhere—from simple site introductions to numerous per-page advertisements to web sites that are built entirely in Flash—and it is this overuse of Flash that is problematic.

A few years ago my browser started to crash at least twice a day—and all the tabs I had open were lost alongside the crash as well.  These crashes were, largely, the result of Flash failing and taking the browser with it.  With the introduction of Internet Explorer 7, and its new Manage Add-ons feature, I began disabling Flash on a regular basis—and, as a result, my browser stopped crashing.  Disabling Flash also benefitted me by reducing CPU utilization, providing protection from recurrent security vulnerabilities in Flash and eliminating Flash-based advertisements and many of the annoying moving things on various social networking and similar sites, but it also prevented me from watching the occasional Flash-only videos—so I would have to regularly enable Flash too.

I found myself really enjoying a Flash-less web, but I was annoyed with the process of enabling and disabling Flash and decided to make a simple toolbar button that would make this a quick one-click deal—and Toggle Flash is the result.  It’s an extremely simple tool that does nothing more than enable and disable Adobe’s Flash.

If you like Toggle Flash, feel free to support it by sending a donation—or just drop me a note saying thanks, a little less flash can be good.