Flashblock for SeaMonkey

January 20, 2010 — BarryK

I have been playing with Quirky 005, thinking how to enhance the multimedia control. Recently when I used dialup I was reminded how slow some pages load, so I have installed Flashblock as one more thing to control page content.

I have made it into a PET package and intend that it will be in the next build of Quirky.

SeaMonkey in Quirky 005 already has these addons:

adblock
user-agent-switcher
zombie-keys

Adblock is off by default, as probably most people will find it annoying, however I have left Flashblock on by default. Flashblock can be disabled on a per-page, per-site or totally basis.

Flashblock home:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Comments

Flash cookies
Username: drongo
Billwho? has a suggestion in this thread for ditching Flash cookies http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=343924 he made a symlink ln -s /dev/null /root/.macromedia Don't know if that would be appropriate for Quirky as you are not giving people the option. Then again, I don't know of anyone ever requesting that Flash cookies be enabled in the first place. I'm sure you don't want this entry to degenerate into a favourite addon bunfight, but I can't help putting in a plea for Noscript. The combination of Noscript, Adblock and Flashblock really makes Puppy browsers fly. i know some people think you don't need all three of these together but it gives more granular control of your browsing. Thanks for Puppy, Woof and Quirky - they run rings round most other things I've tried.

Blocking Flash Cookies
Username: Terryphi
"Drongo: You can manage your Flash cookies (and more) simply by pointing your browser at: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html This gives access to the Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager. It does whatever you want but Adobe doesn't go out of its way to publicise this feature!

Flash cookies
Username: Terryphi
"Drongo: further to my post above I have looked at this more closely. Although Adobe's Settings Manager allows the user to delete Flash cookies ( the .sol files) it leaves behind a tell-tale empty directory under /root/.macromedia/Flash_player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys for each site visited! A periodic clean-out would probably do for most of us but Billwho?'s suggestion in the forum sounds like a good idea for anyone who wants a more drastic solution and is capable of creating the symlink for themselves.

This blog does not render properly in Firefox 3.6
Username: drongo
"Just upgraded to Firefox 3.6 . Title line has dropped down page. Nose of dog image is now on top of "Stats" "Barry's blog" is written over end of my first comment. I normally visit Puppy sites with Puppy but I can't get Seamonkey through our current Firewall/Proxy.

Firefox
Username: kirk
"I compiled 3.6b3 and 3.6b5, reported this as a broken site. I was wondering if it was fixed in the final version, guess not. Interesting that Chrome has the same problem. Firefox 3.5 rendered this site fine.

Rendering of blog
Username: Terryphi
"I am no expert but the html does not validate starting at the top with the DOCTYPE declaration which would be better as [code]<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">[/code] The content type meta tag would be better as: [code]<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">[/code] After correcting these errors and revalidating at validator.w3.org many more errors are revealed suggesting that lower down some of the code used seems more appropriate to xhtml rather that HTML 4.01 Transitional. This probably explains the rendering problem with some browsers. Ideally it would be good to convert the whole thing to XHTLM 1.0.

Rendering of blog
Username: Terryphi
"Yes, xhtml has been mixed in with html. Closing tag with /> rather than > is used in many locations where this is only appropriate for xhtml not html. Link URLs are not enclosed in quotes. They should be href="URL" rather than href=URL.

Tags: quirky