Franci Penov

A nice free utility to cope with this is Flash Toggler. You can choose when you want to see Flash content:

"A system tray utility that lets you toggle Flash(r) support on and off via a system tray icon. When used in conjunction with a pop-up killer program you gain control over much of the Internet advertising that tries to worm it's way onto your screen."

http://nomad.arsware.org/

i believe there's a plugin for firefox that gives you the option of whether to play each movie.

Dont you hate in Flash advertisements when they put the fake X in the top right corner.

You click on it thinking it is going to shut the ad but it just takes you to a whole other myriad of crap advertising.

Thanks for the blockers.

Some of the most annoying flash is on sites I must work on.
Loud music and recurring splash screens :S

"Macromedia Flash based. You know - the ones that jump out on half the page in the browser and play loud music and in general get in your way."

Why blame Flash? These overlay ads can be made in any technology (admitedly 99.9% are flash) but only work in IE (due to it's lax security model and non-standard treatment of layers), so why not blame IE? Simple answer, switch to Firefox.

The Macromedia Flash Player is part of most operating system installations these days, and as you point out, is also a major part of the World Wide Web's content itself. Some do still use text-based browsers to avoid audio/visual media, but it's a hard path to take.

If an advertisement is stupid and counterproductive, then it's good to get your feedback back to (a) the advertiser paying to give you a negative perception of their product; and (b) the site itself which hosts such low-quality advertisements.

(You could send a message to any of the Macromedia input channels too, but considering that there's no licensing or testing required before using the software, then I'm not sure what can be done on that end.)

Bad ads and bad pages are indeed a problem, regardless of delivery format... GIF ads blink just as much, in-page MP3 are fortunately an aberration whose time has gone.

Since you work with Microsoft, Franci, have you looked into Service Pack 2 yet? Its "Addons Manager" offers you finer control of how system-level ActiveX extensions work within the Microsoft browser. Barb Bowman has info here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/security/expert/bowman_sp2.mspx#XSLTsection132121120120

For what it's worth, a good advertisement won't go all soapbox-y until you give it explicit direction... take a look at how video is controlled in this "Go Away Spray" example:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flash/articles/video_ads_fak.html

People at Macromedia are trying to influence good advertising design, but it's hard to enforce it... here are some resources, including how-to, galleries, and best-practices recommendations:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/rich_media_ads/
http://macromedia.com/software/flash/flash_ad_kit/

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support