Tuesday, April 14, 2009

» FlashBlock WannaBe +

I've been using Midori as my primary browser for a number of months (I have a daily cron job that updates and builds WebKit and Midori). It's a fast little browser using WebKit for it's rendering engine and SFX for it's JS engine, so it's standards compliant and really, really fast. And it implements some handy, commonly used features (e.g., error console, user scripts / styles, element inspector).

One feature I've been missing from FireFox is the FlashBlock extension. For those of you who have never used FlashBlock, it essentially replaces flash elements in the page with a placeholder element, which, when clicked, displays the original flash content. It has some other bells and whistles (such as a custom context menu which allows you to directly copy the location of the flash file, or block flash elements on a per-object or per-domain basis, a toolbar button to enable or disable the extension, &c). However, it's the core behavior that I've been missing.

To remedy this situation I looked for user scripts to the emulate the FlashBlock behavior. To my chagrin, I only found scripts which partially emulate the behavior (with most of them doing so inefficiently). So, in a fit of "Not Created Here," and seeking functionality not yet available, I hacked up my own FlashBlock user script; thus was born FlashBlock WannaBe.

Here is version 0.1.0 of FlashBlock WannaBe, relased under the MIT license.

FlashBlock.user.js.txt (remove the .txt extension)
FlashBlock.css

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