I’ve been heavily interested in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. It’s the only sporting event that I pay a lot of attention to. So, it’s understandable that I visit sports sites like Sports Illustrated and ESPN. One of things I find really annoying about ESPN is that it loads a Flash movie automatically on every page, which not only slows down my browsing but it breaks in with some sports announcer talking too loud and too fast. Obviously, this is not my favorite experience.

Using Firefox I can take advantage of the Adblock extension to block Flash, or any adverts that I find annoying. Unfortunately it isn’t the only browser I use regularly, and I’m likely to stop work occasionally to check a score in Safari, Camino or iCab, which, by the way, has become an excellent browser. Fortunately, there is a solution to taming those annoying movies and ads in any browser.

Macromedia, the maker of Flash, offers an online Settings Manager, that lets us edit which sites have access to play Flash in our browsers. This page offers a small control panel that works much like the cookies manager in our browser Preferences.

You can bookmark the page from, or simply right/control click on any embedded Flash player in any web page. Choose Settings and a little box pops up that will ask if you want to all that site to access your camera and microphone. Unless you are using a site like Odeo to create podcasts this is probably not going to be very helpful to you. However clicking on the Advanced button will take you to the Flash Settings Manager Website. There you can manage all of your Flash Player access settings. From the site:

What can I do with the Settings Manager?

Macromedia is committed to providing you with options to control Flash content and Flash applications. The Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager lets you manage global privacy settings, storage settings, security settings, and automatic notification settings by using the following panels:

• To specify whether websites must ask your permission before using your camera or microphone, you use the Global Privacy Settings Panel.
• To specify the amount of disk space that websites you haven’t yet visited can use to store information on your computer, or to prevent websites you haven’t yet visited from storing information on your computer, you use the Global Storage Settings Panel.
• To view or change your security settings, you use the Global Security Settings Panel.
• To specify if and how often Flash Player should check for updated versions, you use the Global Notifications Settings Panel.
• To view or change the privacy settings for websites you have already visited, you use the Website Privacy Settings Panel.
• To view or change the storage settings for websites you have already visited, or to delete information that any or all websites have already stored on your computer, you use the Website Storage Settings Panel.

How do I get to the Settings Manager?

The Settings Manager is a special control panel that runs on your local computer but is displayed within and accessed from the Macromedia website. Macromedia does not have access to the settings that you see in the Settings Manager or to personal information on your computer.

Click the links below to open the specific Settings Manager panel that you want. The Settings Manager that you see on the page is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager. To change your settings, click the tabs to see different panels, then click the options in the Settings Manager panels that you see on the web page.

• Global Privacy Settings Panel
• Global Storage Settings Panel
• Global Security Settings Panel
• Global Notifications Settings Panel
• Website Privacy Settings Panel
• Website Storage Settings Panel

The settings in the Settings Manager apply to all websites that contain Flash content, rather than just a specific website.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under Internet Facts, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.