Quite recently there's been more and more of a push against the usage of Adobe's Flash plugin in websites.
It's become quite an outdated technology actually. It does have bugs, despite Adobe's statements to the contrary.

This page exploits a bug that I reported to Adobe in September 2008, and has affected every release of Flash on every platform since then. Despite numerous email exchanges with the Flash product manager about the bug, the bug report being hidden from the public for "security" reasons, and Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch's claims otherwise, it continues to be an issue.

link: Flash Crash!

And with the likes of both Vimeo and YouTube now providing HTML5 version of their online videos to most modern browsers, it's looking like Adobe market share in this space will start to rapidly dwindle.

And watch out when Microsoft introduces HTML5 into it's Internet Explorer browser shortly - that'll really speed along the demise of Flash.

For me though, I find Flash to be both taxing on any computer as well as affecting loading times and bandwidth usage - the latter isn't much of a problem in today's higher data allowance, for those countries with good broadband plans. Being able to turn Flash off and on is actually quite a wonderful alternative i.e. having it disabled by default is great and then being able to switch it back on for a certain page is certainly an advantage.

And cutting down on CPU usage and load times also is fantastic for preserving more laptop battery life too!

Good reasons for doing this include default blocking of numerous Flash based advertising, speeding up page loading (as the majority of blogs, news sites etc have Flash based banners running continuously) and generally having a better browsing experience.

To that end, some simple Google searching revealed lots of browser plugins to help in getting Flash under control for your browser.

ClickToFlash - For Safari OSX based browsers
Flashblock - For Firefox, Netscape and Flock browsers

Try them out and let me know how your experience goes, by posting in the comments below.
If you've got other helpful plugins, let me know in the comments as well.

Happy browsing everyone.