Blocks plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and Java from loading components onto pages automatically.
Plugins can load annoying resources onto web pages like music players or invading ads. They also often don't integrate all too well with the web page they're on, or require ridiculous amounts of CPU power to perform a simple task. This extension gives you control over what reaches you and what shouldn't.
Incidentally, since most ads today are made with Flash, it's also a very efficient ad blocker.
You probably have many more Internet plugins than you believe. Currently, your browser has counting... plugins, which enables you to see counting... other document types. Flash is just one of them.
It's currently impossible to directly control the preferences area of an extension. Therefore, whenever you ask Plugin Customs to remember something (like always allowing certain resources, or whitelisted sites), it places the information in its Settings page, so you can change your mind later about what you accept and what you don't.
This page can be accessed by clicking the Plugin Customs Settings Safari toolbar item, which is not shown by default because quite frankly, you don't need to change these settings very often.
You can add the Plugin Customs toolbar item to your Safari toolbar by following these steps:
Short version: Plugin Customs might sometimes contact this web server to tell about an unknown plugin type to help enhance this extension. Nothing else is collected (especially not the URL on which the plugin was encountered), and the information transmitted cannot contain any information that could identify you. Because of these measures to protect your privacy, the feature is opt-out. You may disable it by going to the Plugin Customs preferences.
In version 1, Plugin Customs based its guesses for the content type on the seldom-present type
HTML attribute. When it was absent, it would issue a request to the hosting server to ask the content type. This was,
all in all, not very efficient. Version 2 still prefers the type HTML attribute to determine the plugin type,
but it also uses the legacy (but still very present) classid HTML attribute.
This approach gives a significant speed boost to the extension. The problem is that classids look nothing like
the plugin type they're referencing, and you have to manually establish a mapping between classids and plugin
types to make it useful. For instance, when Plugin Customs sees clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000,
it knows the page is trying to load Flash content, but when it sees a classid it doesn't know, there really
isn't much to do except ask the type of the content to the server (which is slow).
To help enhance the system, Plugin Custom will automatically send me any classid it doesn't know about. It does not
send any other information, not even the page on which the content was found. I can then look up the classid attribute
on any Internet search engine and add a direct mapping to the extension.
classid attribute of objects to try to guess their type. This will often make detection faster, too.