Flash ON / Flash OFF on MacBook Air with zsh

Posted by moonwatcher at Monday, January 10, 2011 | 2 comments

Labels: code , flash , mac

Just got my new shiny MacBook Air, which as part of Steve's escalating War On Flash, comes without a Flash plugin preinstalled. After some googling i was fairly informed of the claims, which I find very easy to believe, that Flash shaves 2 hours of the battery life on typical web browsing, probably due to disregarding the existence of a GPU and being utilized mostly for epileptic seizure inducing advertisements. Being an Ad blocking fanatic, and not having my fine tuned squid proxy when on the go, I decided that living without Flash might not be such a bad idea...

Alas! living entirely without flash means no google analytics and sometimes no other things that i do need occasionally :(

So i whipped up two zsh aliases for flashing ON and flashing OFF.

All you need to do is move the files:

/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt

to, say:

~/.flash/Flash Player.plugin
~/.flash/flashplayer.xpt

add to your ~/.zshrc :

alias flashon="ln -s ~/.flash/Flash\ Player.plugin ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/ 2>/dev/null; ln -s ~/.flash/flashplayer.xpt ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/ 2>/dev/null"
alias flashoff="rm ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Flash\ Player.plugin 2>/dev/null; rm ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt 2>/dev/null"

Now typing flashoff or flashon in your shell (and restarting the browser...) will toggle the flash plugin loading. Flash ON Flash OFF... Daniel San.

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2 comments

jan.jungnickel at June 10, 2011 8:24 AM

Have you considered http://clicktoflash.com/?

moonwatcher at June 10, 2011 4:29 PM

I have considered clicktoflash, in fact it was my first attempt. But it fills the pages with it's controls and its browser specific. plus the flash plugin is still loaded just not instantiated on every tag.

My way, you can completely disable it for all browsers. I realize its not exactly a solution for everyone, but for the hackers among you it should be quit elegant.