In my opinion, Flash is the worst thing to happen to the internet since IE. It eats up CPU, causes crashes and makes it far too easy for banner ads to annoy the hell out of you. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just stop your browser loading them in an unobtrusive and elegant manner?

Well yes it would, and that is exactly what ClickToFlash aims to do.

It installs just like a regular internet plug-in and replaces every occurrence of Flash on a webpage with a nice little Flash icon. Clicking the icon activates the Flash plugin for that item.

Here it is in action on the Cineworld homepage. I never realised people actually used Flash to render fonts!

ClickToFlash also has a neat little trick up it’s sleeve when it comes to playing video on YouTube. A quick change to the settings allows ClickToFlash to play back the H.264 stream natively as if it were embedded using the new HTML 5 video tags.

Pretty awesome. Now Safari doesn’t crash every ten minutes and as a bonus I can finally watch YouTube HD without it sucking up 200% of my CPU.