I’ve just downloaded Safari 5 - perhaps a bit prematurely but I was curious. One bug that was plaguing my web browsing experience in Safari 4 was that the mouse pointer would not change back to its normal state after it was dragged off one of those annoying flash banners (you know.. the ones that invite you to shoot at stuff and turn your cursor into a target reticle). Bloody annoying - to get it back I’d have to drag the cursor off the page and click back in it. Safari 5 did not cure said bug.

So I decided to finally check out clicktoflash. Click to flash is a plugin that purports to stop loading flash items on a page till required. It hasn’t been updated in time to say its compatible with Safari 5 but it seemed to work fine for me.

Safari isn’t renowned for its extensibility and that’s probably due to its lack of a plugin api system such as the one used by firefox for example. Therefore 3rd parties have had to rely on less than straightforward means to extend safari such as developing their own plugin architectures such as simbl. This, however though useful, tends to break when apple updates the browser.

So Click to Flash’s installation was a doddle. Once installed and active, the plugin greys out the area that would’ve been occupied by the flash movie. A little widge appears on each instance which allows you to select from a few options including allowing the individual flash movie to load or all those on the page. Very quick and useful.

It also has some cool features that show it’s a mature product - namely a managed whitelist for sites you wish to allow flash (useful for those of us who have to check out “cool” flash website for a living). I’ve already reaped the benefits as it has cured those flash pointer probs. Another benefit I found - Click to Flash seems to have disabled those really annoying ads that move the whole content of a page down rather than the ad popping above the content (I’m looking at you italian sports paper websites!).

Other benefits include the option to force youtube to play its videoclips through h.264 rather than flash. Most if not all of the vids on youtube have been converted by google so as to be viewed on iOS devices. Unfortunately this was a feature that never made to desktops. From what I can tell, the flash player on the Mac is a major resource hog and one of the biggest causes for system slow down. I’m guessing the h.264 codec and the quicktime plugin will ease the burden.

I won’t go into the pros and cons of flash cos well I’ve made a living thanks to flash and it can be put to great use - I’ll leave it to the Steve Jobs and the Adobes of this world to duke it out but one thing is for sure, since the arrival of technologies such as the scriptaculous javascript libraries and other javascript frameworks, a lot of the cool stuff we were forced to use flash for can be executed without. Whereas before I’d propose a hybrid html / flash site, I’d not propose a pure html site because I know I now have the tools available that would let clients still get excited… Should apple integrate this functionality into Safari? Not sure but it would be nice to have as an option.

Anyways if you wish to claw back the web for yourself rather than be forced to get out of bed at 1 am because of a flash ad deciding to play loud music by itself… download click to flash now (ps. it’s donationware so you can download and use for free).