My browser of choice these days is Firefox, despite its recent problems with bloat, performance and the user interface.

I recently made a change to the way Firefox handles embedded content like Java, Flash, Shockwave and Silverlight. By default, Firefox displays embedded media automatically; when you visit a web page that contains embedded media, it plays immediately after loading.

To change this behaviour, do the following:

1. Go to the Firefox Add-ons page. How you do this depends on the version of Firefox, but one method that always works is to enter ‘about:addons’ in the address bar.
2. In the menu on the left, click ‘Plugins’.
3. To the right of each listed plugin, there’s a button. Clicking that button drops down a list with these options: ‘Ask to Activate’, ‘Always Activate’ and ‘Never Activate’.
4. Change the activation setting for each plugin. ‘Never Activate’ disables a plugin completely. ‘Always Activate’ means that the associated media will run without any user intervention (the default behaviour). ‘Ask to Activate’ will prompt the user before playing the associated media. I set the following plugins to ‘Ask to Activate’: all Java plugins, all Flash plugins, all Shockwave plugins, and all Silverlight plugins.

Once you’ve made these changes, visiting a web page that includes embedded media shows grey blocks where the media would normally appear. A link appears in the middle of each block: ‘Activate Adobe Flash’, ‘Activate Java’, etc. Clicking the ‘Activate’ link pops up a small dialog that allows you to activate the media this time only, or permanently for that particular web site.

This has several benefits:

• Malicious code in Java, Flash and other media files no longer runs automatically when I visit sites that use them. This makes web surfing much safer.
• Pages that contain embedded media load faster. If I decide that I want to actually watch some embedded media on a site, I only have to click the ‘Activate’ link.
• I can now see exactly what kind of media is embedded on a web page, which is especially useful for determining the relative popularity of different kinds of media.