Open Safari’s preferences from the Safari menu in the menu bar; click on the Extensions tab, then click on ClickToPlugin in the left column; finally, click the Uninstall button in the right-hand pane.
There are three ways to access ClickToPlugin’s preference pane:
Starting with Safari 7, the last two methods only work on web pages whose security policy allows the loading of iframes.
You should not use both, and there is no reason to use ClickToFlash instead of ClickToPlugin. No matter what your intended usage is, ClickToFlash will not be more efficient than ClickToPlugin. ClickToFlash only exists for historical reasons.
No. However, websites can check if your browser supports a given plug-in, and change the page accordingly. For example, Facebook does not insert the Flash player into the page unless Flash is enabled, so there’s nothing for ClickToPlugin to replace.
All whitelist-like text fields in the preferences support regular expressions. For a string to be considered as a regular expression, it must be preceded by the @ symbol. These regular expressions must follow the Javascript syntax (in particular, lookbehinds are not supported). Invalid regular expressions are ignored.
Not until all of the following are possible within that dedicated area: language localization; displaying the list of installed plug-ins; customizable keyboard shortcuts; multiline text areas.
I will not add killers to the extension from now on. Extra killers and instructions to make new ones can be found here.
“Invisible plug-ins” refer to plug-in objects so small that they are difficult to see or click. Sometimes such objects provide important functionality for a web page, so allowing them automatically may be convenient. However, for security and privacy reasons, automatically allowing invisible plug-ins on arbitrary pages is not recommended: they are often used to spy on your browsing habits and can store cookies that bypass any of the browser’s privacy settings. Moreover, it is possible for a plug-in object to be small at first but grow once it is loaded.
This is a bug in Safari which affects all extensions that use messaging from the global page to content scripts. It does not indicate that there is something wrong with these extensions, nor that they have a negative effect on Safari’s performance in real-life usage.
In the case of ClickToPlugin, removing the unique listener to message events from the content scripts (which is not needed for ClickToPlugin’s core functionality) results in a SunSpider benchmark which is identical to that obtained with no extensions.
Starting from Safari 8, YouTube is completely Flash-free. As a result, ClickToPlugin should have no effect on YouTube. Nevertheless, by popular request, the YouTube killer in ClickToPlugin includes a hack that forces YouTube to offer the old Flash player. This has the following consequences:
Because you have Perian installed and YouTube’s HTML5 player uses the WebM version of the video instead of the H.264 version when possible. YouTube does not provide a way to choose the H.264 version, but this can be done using a custom script such as this one or by upgrading to Safari 6 which hides WebM playback capability on YouTube.
Yes, you can override any extension’s styles in your user stylesheet (selected in Safari’s Advanced preferences). You only have to make sure that your selectors have higher specificity than those in ClickToPlugin’s stylesheet.
No. The ability to stop playback on an AirPlay device is provided by the Media Center extension. Finer control is not possible from Safari.
No, this is not possible for technical reasons. To view a whole playlist on an AirPlay device, each track must be sent separately.
All my code on GitHub is under the WTFPL license.
No.
More likely the web page’s functionality relies on a hidden or very small plug-in object which ClickToPlugin blocks. In many cases the “Load All Plug-ins” command is enough to restore the web page to a working state. A permanent solution for all cases is the following. Select the “Block plug-ins manually” checkbox in the preferences and reload the page. For every plug-in object on the page, a dialog will appear: click OK to block the object and Cancel to load it. Use this to find out which objects must be loaded for the page to work, and match their sources (given in the dialogs) using the source whitelist.
This never has and will never happen. What happens is that YouTube now has its own HTML5 player which looks very similar to its Flash player. The HTML5 player is used instead of the Flash player if you are enrolled in YouTube’s HTML5 trial.
This video is probably an HTML5 video and not a plug-in. Such videos cannot be blocked with ClickToPlugin.
There are two known causes:
This can happen for a variety of reasons over which ClickToPlugin has no control. For example, the server can refuse to respond to requests made from Safari’s downloader or from an Apple TV, and there are video formats that can be played in Safari but not in QuickTime Player or on a given AirPlay device.
This is because a single tab can contain documents whose URLs are different than the URL displayed in the Address Field. To find out the URL of the document containing a blocked object, select the “Block plug-ins manually” checkbox in the preferences, right-click the object’s placeholder, and choose “Get Plug-in Info”.
Uninstall and reinstall the extension (this will reset the extension’s settings). If that doesn’t fix your problem, then you can contact me and I’ll be happy to help.
See the list of open issues on GitHub.
This is a list of known bugs in the latest release of Safari or in the WebKit nightly builds that affect parts of the extension.
| Report | Description |
|---|---|
| #44023 | The Java plug-in cannot be blocked when embedded via an <applet> element. |
| #74451 | The presence of any beforeload event listener can break scripts that rely on an image’s load event. |
| rdar://9950247 | Listening to message events on safari.self slows down the SunSpider Javascript benchmark significantly. |
| #23364 | Subpixel antialiasing is disabled in hardware accelerated layers. As soon as a media element starts playing, the text in its controls, in ClickToPlugin’s source selector, and in ClickToPlugin’s preference window will be affected. |