[SwellJoe]

I disagree that click-to-flash is an "ideal" way of handling this.

Personally, I wish I had click-to-flash on my desktop. Flash is so often used for intrusive ends, I'd rather it be sandboxed from the real web content. Of course, these days, HTML can be used for similar intrusive content, but it rarely is, so far.

[qeorge]

For Firefox, there's FlashBlock:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/

which I can attest works wonderfully.

For Chrome, I believe there's a version of FlashBlock, and for Safari, www.clicktoflash.com looks good (I have not tried either of these though).