I’m of the opinion that almost 100% of the Flash I encounter on web sites is a waste of time. It’s bad enough that a good portion of it is merely gratuitous, but it is frequently abused by advertisers to create blinking ads that you can’t easily stop. I therefore have the flash plugin completely disabled. Imagine how the IMAX web site reinforced my opinion of flash when it opened as an empty page. Because Kovu had mentioned that Star Wars II was coming to IMAX theaters, I bothered to re-enable the plugin to be greeted by a dull flash intro and then the site launched in a popup window. Great! Why do people do this? Did they assume that the flash intro was so cool that I’d want to keep playing with it while I browsed their site? It’s truly a shame; the site works nicely if you skip directly to the real IMAX site. I just don’t get it.
Perhaps someday Mozilla or Phoenix will have the ability to block flash on a per site basis (Bug 94035).