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by mistercow 5182 days ago
To take care of the invisible Flash object problem, Firefox could copy what Chrome does for Java applets and have a bar pop up at the top of the whole page, asking if you want to allow Flash to run on the site in question.
4 comments

Pandora uses jPlayer to play audio which has an invisible Flash component to play mp3s on browsers that don't support it.

If Firefox requires 'click-to-play' on an on-screen piece of Flash to enable it, all sites using jPlayer to play mp3 simply will not work.

And of course this doesn't just affect jPlayer, many other players use this technique.

Much better -- as mistercow reasons -- to have a pop-up asking you if you wish to run Flash on a particular site and I would love to see an 'always allow' option here.

Doesn't Firefox support mp3?
Guys/gals,

Let's please try to explain things instead of just downvoting questions.

Try this link http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=21175...

TL;DR there is a licensing issue with the MP3 decoder. It's more complicated than that, but most of it is due to software patents. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#section_10 has more info if you're curious.

I use Chromium, and have old flash installed. Every page shows me this bar asking me to update flash, with button to enable all flash on this page. It's very convenient, even more than FlashBlock on Firefox was.
The nightlies already have this, in the form of a plugin icon at the extreme left of the location bar.
If only Chrome did this with it's current click to play implementation
It does, though not with the same UI as the Java plugin: http://i.imgur.com/xHrRX.png

Clicking the puzzle piece shows a menu to "always allow" or to "enable all Flash applets on this page" (and a few other things).

I can see a more obtrusive/apparent UI being implemented if Firefox makes click-to-Flash default.

That's not the same interface that I was referring to. I was talking about this: http://i.imgur.com/8lzif.png
it's not the same appearance, but it's the same functionality.
No it's not, because if the Flash object is invisible, it simply does not give you any way to enable them unless you go to the preferences and explicitly add an exception.

This was my entire point in the first place, if you look up at the beginning of the thread. For example, turn on click-to-play and then go to pandora.com. If Chrome treated Flash the same as Java, you would still be able to use pandora easily.

read his post again. he's not talking about the click-to-play ui. there's a puzzle piece icon in the taskbar. clicking it displays a drop-down menu, and even if the flash is invisible you can choose the "enable flash on this page" option.
A problem I found with Chrome's current implementation is on pages where you don't even know flash is being used, Google Translate and Soundcloud for example, after thinking the site was broken I remembered I had click-to-enable active.
Indeed, this happens to me too. And I think this is why Mozilla will need to have a very good UI to tell the user how to fix a broken site (or just fix it for them e.g. through a crowd collective).
Unfortunately the current implementation breaks some pages for no reason (such as wimp.com that becomes completely unusable).
Chrome has a click-to-play implementation for Flash? That is not a plugin? Do I have to go to chrome://flags or something?
Yes.

Preferences > Under the Hood > Privacy > Content Settings > Plug-ins > Click to play

Or you can search for "Flash" or "Click to play" to find the setting.

Wow, thank you for sharing this. I love when Chrome obviates the need an extension to do something simple like this!
Nice. I didn't know about this until now. Nifty! Although, a bit of a elusive setting.