Macromedia (Shockwave and) Flash is one of the great woes of the modern World Wide Web: this despicable plugin makes Web sites with no notion of accessibility, and which are, basically, a pain to navigate. I also hate Flash because the plugin was badly written (by a million monkeys I suppose) so it makes my browser unstable. But when a site's main content is Flash, I suppose the pain must be borne (and I did, reluctantly, install the plugin on my browser) if I am to access the site's content (though I should probably write an insulting form letter to send to the webmaster of every Flash-using web site I encounter). However, when the site uses Flash in side advertising then my anger knows no bounds. For these stupid animations cannot be stopped! Imagine that: knowing their users are hostages, Macromedia does not provide a “stop animation” button on their Flash widgets. And there is nothing more distracting than a continuous side animation when one is trying to read neighboring (fixed) text; which is, of course, the intended effect: to distract the reader's attention toward the advertising.
Fortunately, the great and might Mozilla-blessed-be-its-name has come up with a partial solution: this “Flash Click to view” Mozilla extension, using the simplest and most elegant Mozilla code (thus illustrating its power and flexibility, besides) replaces Flash animations with a button that one must simply press to get the plugin started.
This is going to change my life!