238388 - Plugin Blocker feature like we have image blocking today

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 94035

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

Image blocking is a great technique for cutting out ads from web pages. You can
easily block images if they come from a specific website / url.

But now more and more websites are moving to plugin based ads using Flash. It
may be time to consider keeping up with this trend and adding plugin blocking on
per website basis. It would work and look just like image blocking with a
context menu on the web page for 'Block plugins from *website*'. 

This might get hard if we want to be adding the context menu when you are
hovering over the actual plugin because the plugin may own that context menu.

You'd also need UI in the options dialog just like we have for showing the list
of blocked image sites, to show a list of blocked plugin sites...

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

Mozilla suite bug for this is bug 94035

Comment 2

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

bug 240070 will give the posibility to block objects. And other stuff, if
wanted. I don't want to add UI there though, this is something that should be
don in this bug.

Comment 3

[Brennan Leathers]

surely you know this functionality is already in the adblock extension. just
block  /*.swf

easy. 

if you're saying this needs to be incorporated into the app itself without an
extension, you should make it clearer. this isn't really a bug to me.

Comment 4

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

*** Bug 251563 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Ken]

I would sooner see this as a builtin feature, very much like the "I have blocked
a popup for you".  For example, you could configure it so that specific plugins
would always be blocked (flash springs to mind as originally posted!) then 99%
of the time you would not see flash ****.  Then for the 1% of the time that you
actually need flash, you can click in the info bar and say the equivalent of
"allow this page to show popup" only it would be "allow this page to execute the
flash plugin".  Would be extremely user friendly and powerful.  IE killer. 
You'll notice how IE has copied this feature and a lot of other good ones from
mozilla for XP SP2, but  I digress... ;-)

Comment 6

[Ken]

> You'll notice how IE has copied this feature and a lot of other good ones from
> mozilla for XP SP2, but  I digress... ;-)

When I said copied this feature, I meant the infobar.  No-one blocks flash in
this way (that I know of) at the moment, but it would be fantastic if it could
be done.

Comment 7

[Robin Munn]

Should this be given severity "enhancement" instead of severity "normal"? I
would have made that change, but I don't know what the conventions are for
making changes in Bugzilla...

And I'd echo Ken's comment about putting the same UI as for popup blocking. I
want to be able to block flash by default, but let it through for certain sites
like Homestar Runner -- seeing "Firefox has blocked 3 Flash animation(s) on this
site, click here to change preferences" would be wonderful.

Comment 8

[Robert Rothenberg]

Bug 94035 is now a Core bug, so this should be marked as a duplicate of it,

Comment 9

[Ryuichi KUBUKI]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 94035 ***