I did my part to help yesterdays' Firefox 3.0 release make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Breaking world records is in my blood. I was part of the world's largest musical chairs competition (Guinness Book of World Records, 1977, p. 476). Unfortunately, that record stood for exactly one year.

But back to the point of this post: After installing Firefox 3.0 I wanted to suppress annoying animated Flash graphics. In the past I just disabled Flash entirely, which meant that I was out of luck for the 1% of the time that I actually wanted to view Flash content.

However, I had the good fortune to discover the Flashblock Firefox add-in. This nifty bit of software suppresses Flash rendering, except for whitelisted websites. And you can always temporarily enable Flash rendering with a single mouse click. Recommended!

For the longest time I've noticed that Firefox 2.X did not cache graphics from many websites, at least not on the multiple machines, VMs, and operating systems on which I ran it. It looks like Firefox 3.X has addressed this problem. Here's how to look at your browser cache: browse to about:cache.

Finally: Take a look at my other Firefox tip on suppressing other sorts of animated graphics.

Sometimes I think I'm the only one on the web that actually reads web pages. How can everyone else read anything, with so many animated ads trying to distract your attention away from the words?