Good Browser Tip For News Sites

Those of you who, like me, have had problems with news sites freezing up on you will appreciate the tip a fellow who commented on a recent post (December 21) gave. He pointed out that sites that rely on Jave Script or Shockwave Flash can cause the site to load slow or freeze. I'd already figured that out earlier. 

What I didn't know is you can set your browser's add-on preferences to ask before activating the flash player. I thought you had to either have it installed and running, or uninstall it. If you uninstall it, you can't watch videos on Youtube and similar sites.

I use Firefox as he does so went to my browser's Add- Ons page. I didn't find the No Script add-on the fellow referred to, but I did find a list of add- ons with a menu next to each application that allows you to choose whether to have it on all the time, ask before activating, or keep turned off. I changed mine to Ask Before Activating and it seems to be the fix for all the news sites I checked so far.

You end up with a bunch of brown boxes where the pics and videos normally would be, but there's a link in the middle asking if you want to run the add on. As the commenter pointed out, you're generally on a news site for text so who cares about the brown boxes? You can always activate the add on/script should you feel the need to.

In Firefox, go to Tools>Add-ons>Plugins. Then you can manage all your plugins.