Comments on: How ClickToFlash works

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:16:04 +0000

Rick: Jonathan Rentzsch’s current ClickToFlash source (what will be 1.4) has a “Load H.264” contextual menu item that does that for YouTube videos. As you suggested, it switches the movie over to QuickTime. Thank Troy Gaul for adding it.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:47:50 +0000

Mark Malone: In your case, you may prefer to turn plug-ins off, uninstall Flash, or switch to a brower (such as OmniWeb) that lets you turn specific plug-ins on and off.

By: Mark Malone

Mark Malone — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:28:35 +0000

I don’t mind ads as much as I mind non-standard content on a web page. If doubleclick and other ad purveyors detect that you don’t have flash, they’ll offer gifs and jpegs instead; I’m OK with these since I know the bulk of the free web requires them in order to stay in business but theses flash ads tend to be way too obtrusive. Unfortunately, I don’t think a plug-in can be written that intercepts flash and makes the ad flash detection logic think flash isn’t installed so that images are served but the flash content is fetched when the image is clicked.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:07:54 +0000

Duncan: There’s one pretty obvious countermeasure. I’ve added a bit of text in the middle of the post; it should clear it up for you.

drew: I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It might reduce advertiser usage of Flash, but not nearly as much as Google has and not as much as FlashBlock, either; moreover, it may actually promote other use of Flash because it saves you from having to turn Flash off entirely in order to keep the ads from annoying you.

By: Rick

Rick — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:28:10 +0000

This makes me wonder how feasible it might be to detect certain kinds of Flash videos and redirect them to the QuickTime plugin. On YouTube it’s possible to work out the URL to an (often higher-quality) MP4 from a video’s embed URL, and if you have the Perian codec package installed you can play FLV (after finding the actual video URL in the embed/object tag of many players) via QuickTime… either of which might be more desirable than the quirky player UIs and turn-the-fans-up-to-11 CPU inefficiency of handing them off to the Flash plugin.

By: g

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:51:27 +0000

Cute. I wrote a Flash-blocker plugin for my own use with a different architecture. It loaded a private captive copy of the real Flash plugin, but only fed plugin events to it after the first click event. It didn’t work as well as ClickToFlash because Flash content would still run without drawing, so the CPU and network costs were just as high.

By: drew

drew — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:53:42 +0000

Excuse me if I’m being naïve, but would this break if Adobe modified the mime type strings to only be one type?
I sure hope they don’t get around it, but they do seem intent on ramming flash down our necks via the web.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:52:42 +0000

I think this is great stuff, but I’m concerned that sites depending on Flash-based ad revenue (note to such sites: use static, non-CPU-hog banners and nobody gets hurt) will change something to defeat this. Any speculation what such counter-measures might be?

By: Mark Rowe

Mark Rowe — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:40:14 +0000

ClickToFlash is loaded as WebKit prefers to load WebKit-style plug-ins over Netscape-style plug-ins if both claim a MIME type.

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:54:54 +0000

When looking for a suitable plugin for a give MIME type, why does WebKit load ClickToFlash instead of Flash Player? Is the namespace collision resolved via “first to load”(e.g. ZZZClickToFlash wouldn’t work) or is preference given to Info.plist entries before STR# resources? Anyone know?