Control Option Command

Is it hypocritical of me to write about a Flash blocker when I’ve spent a good portion of my time the last four years doing Flash? Maybe, but some of the sites out there have ridiculous amounts of intrusive and annoying banner ads, and I just can’t stand having my the fans on my Mac blowing a fuse every time I want to check out the news.

My favorite implementation of Flash-blocking has always been ClickToFlash which is a Safari-only plugin that works exactly as advertised. You click the element to load Flash. Sadly, as mentioned, it’s Safari-only and my browser of choice these days is Google Chrome.

Fortunately I found a port, or perhaps a backwards engineered version for Chrome named, somewhat more aggressively, Kill-Flash. It works on exactly the same principle. All Flash elements are replaced with an inconspicuous grey-scale gradient with the label “Flash”, and you “Click To Flash”… Duh.

Stupidly however, I have found no simple way to add sites to the plugins whitelist. A few sites (YouTube and GMail) are whitelisted by default, but no option that I’ve found to add new sites. There are several sites I visit on a regular basis and where I want to see the Flash. Hell, my own blog uses several (subtle, I hope) Flash elements and I don’t need to see those grey boxes every time I come here. In fact, personally I think perhaps a “blacklist mode” would be my preferred way to operate.

So, anyway. I started digging around in the Library to figure out how to add sites to the whitelist. The first issue of course is to find out where the whitelist is located. A couple of headscratches later I found that this is the file you need to deal with:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions/kfncbcioneejfnnelcdmocdjncbmceea /1.1/kill_flash.js

I’m not sure whether or not that crazy string is the same for everyone or generated randomly for each installation. If you see the kill_flash.js you’re there.

Opening this file reveals, at the very top the following variable.

What you need to do is simply append the domains you want to whitelist to this array, in quotes and separated by commas. Like so:

When you’ve done this you might want to create an alias for easy access to the file. Personally I just dragged it to my Dock for the sake of convenience.

I might at some point write an AppleScript or something to make this easier. If that ever happens I’ll be sure to post it here.

Do you use any Adobe products? Tell me if this sounds familiar: “Oh hai! I need to update some totally unrelated stuff on your machine! You know, some camera raw stuff or InDesign whatchamacallits, so I’m just going to force you to quit all your browsers, because lordy lordy who knows what might happen if you coincidentally were looking at interwebs while I was installing this shit. Woohoo!”

Yes… The old adobe installer/updater. Let me count the ways I hate you. Quite a few! So, more out of spite than anything else I started checking out what browsers might not be sniffed up by the dreaded ugly beast that is the Adobe Installer/Updater. Turns out they’ve been thorough. Fluid gets away with it, but it’s really not that great for anything but site-specific stuff (which it was made for, and indeed does very well).

So in the end I wrote my own web browser, and of course I did it in AIR (Adobe Integrated AIR Runtime… RAS!).
So let me advice you; This is NOT a good browser, and it is NOT much of a feat to have written it, but it WILL work during an Adobe installation does its thing, and it IS fucking hillarious to use Adobe technology to subvert Adobe technology.

The source is available in the app itself, and you’ll notice that I’ve used this guys styles to pretty it up a bit. Knock yourself out if it takes your fancy. If you install the app you’ll get a very basic browser. A URL field, back and forward history buttons and a search field. Impressively it seems to remember your logins from other browsers, which is not my doing at all. Clicky clicky badgy badgy to install.

Chrome!

And that’s all I have to say about that.¹