Beautiful in the way it works at least. You know those annoying flash ads and gimmicks that websites put all around their content? You know, like the beautiful tag cloud that we’ve got in our sidebar? Well Adobe’s flash plugin for Mac is a resource hog. So if you have a bunch of these flashy pages floating around, chances are your Safari.app is taking up a huge amount of RAM and CPU.
Now you could employ some ad blocking plugins, but they aren’t very user friendly especially when you actually want to see the flash object. Enter a new Safari plugin, “clicktoflash”.
The plugin automatically puts a elegant looking grey backdrop where a flash movie was set to play. If you want to load it anyway, just click. This works for embedded videos, flash ads (not gifs and javascript based) and sheds a whole lot of CPU usage in the bargain.
The installation and uninstallation procedure is dead simple, requiring just a single click on launching the installer. My only problem is that the plugin has no ‘memory’, so you have to click to flash every time you load a page. This has been fixed with the update at GitHub. Go grab your copy of Click to Flash at Google code.
Update: As Gruber pointed out, the Google code project has been taken down. However, the open source project has been moved to GitHub, a social coding site. You can check out that page for details, or direct download the installer.
