I've de-installed Flash, because of some very annoying Web/banner ads (a soccer player cracking my screen at FIFAworldcup.com). So now everytime I go to Yahoo or some other site that uses Flash, I get an annoying pop-up from IE that says 'Security Warning' ... 'Do you want to install and run "Flash 5.0"...'. My only choices are Yes/No/More Info. I click No, only to be beseiged on the next Web page that has Flash content.
Why can't No mean No, not now, not ever?! Yes, I dug through the IE settings and turned off the 'Auto Install' feature, but that only switched the pop-up from the 'Auto Install' pop-up to the 'Security Warning' pop-up.
While I'm at it, why does IE always intrude in my Bookmarks with their own 'Links' folder with plugs for Hotmail and such?
Anyone know any hacks around this?
Jason
Update: I went into my Security Settings and disabled ActiveX, which got rid of the 'Security Warning' pop-up window, but now I get another pop-up that tells me 'You have disabled ActiveX ... this page may not display correctly.' Gee ... you think? Sheez ... Calgon, take me away!!
Mozilla keeps bugging me about the fact that I don't have Flash since I uninstalled it. I can't find a way to tell Moz to forget about it... My current thought was to write a filtering proxy for myself that would kill those files.
Java, too
jdavidb on 2002-06-20T16:38:26
What's really annoying is being prompted in Mozilla to install the Java plugin -- on my PowerPC running Debian. Hint: it doesn't work. And I try to keep my home Linux machines proprietary free, anyway.
Though I don't have Java or Flash, I'm not missing anything. Except the cumulative year of time I've spent clicking, "No, do not install the plugin."
Filter it
jdporter on 2002-06-20T18:33:18
You could do what I did - run privoxy, a really excellent filtering proxy. Runs on windows and linux, installs very cleanly and works as advertised.Easy... well, not too hard... to configure. Its out-of-the-box defaults are almost entirely suitable for most purposes. I just had to add a pass for cookies for a couple sites (use.perl and Yahoo).
No more flash. Yay!
As an interesting little side benefit, the proxy produces a much nicer "host not found" page than the browsers do.
Also, the proxy is configurable through the browser itself, although it's pretty ugly. I edit the files directly with my faVorIte editor. Oh, the other downside to privoxy is that it is not written in Perl, but in some efficient systems programming language like C.
:-/ It's also really easy to turn privoxy filtering on and off. The docs explain how to add a "bookmarklet" to your browser's toolbar (or whatever it's called, where you get one-click access to your most frequent bookmarks) which turns filtering on/off.
Re:Proxomitron
Purdy on 2002-06-20T18:27:20
This is AWESOME!! Got it setup & running in no time flat and it's already saving me from the Flash pop-ups! (I guess it matches the Banner ad stuff, too)... definitely a keeper and will be playing more with this! Thanks, anithri!
Jason
