One of the things that really drains the battery on your laptop quickly is visiting a site that has embedded flash. Whether that’s adverts, content or just whizzy looking graphics. And why would you want your browser to run at 20% of available CPU even when it’s not the active application or you’re just reading the news?

I know I found out very quickly that the 7 hours advertised battery life for my shiny new MacBook Pro was nowhere to be seen when I was browsing the web. A quick look at Activity Monitor showed that the Flash Plugin was consuming heaps of processor on an otherwise idle system. When I closed the tab that had the Flash showing, the processor utilisation dropped to a mere 2% and the battery indicator showed 6 hours remaining.

So I started a search for how I could easily disable Flash from my pages, preferably with the ability to easily switch it on for a particular page if I discover I really do want to see the Flash.

Enter ClickToFlash which does exactly that. It’s extremely simple to install (as are most apps on Mac of course) and after a quick restart of Safari you’ll discover that you no longer have Flash animations starting automatically. Instead you’ll see a nice white box with a Flash box in the middle. And no excess processor usage!

To the left there is an image that looks like what you’ll see. If you click the little gear wheel in the top left, you’ll be presented with a contextual menu that enables you to do exactly what all those options say they’ll do

The options are fairly basic – although one nice feature is that with a simple tick of a box you can enable YouTube videos – probably because you wouldn’t be likely to visit YouTube unless you actually wanted to watch one of the videos, which are encoded using Flash.

Another nice feature is the whitelist – where you can simply type in the domain name of the site you wish to whitelist. Once that’s done you’ll see Flash on that site without needing to press any buttons. I’ve just set this site as a whitelist so that the Image uploader of WordPress is unhindered.

All in all, this very simple little plugin works well, is reliable in Safari 4 on Snow Leopard, and does what it says on the tin.

We give this App 10 out of 10.

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