At work I use the Mozilla Firefox web browser with the Flashblock add-on. This wonderful add-on will prevent flash objects from loading on a page, but still allow you to click the object to load the flash. This is wonderful for blocking those ridiculous flash adverts that consume more resources than the page you are viewing. (I am not overly bothered by the image adverts.)
On my Mac at home I was using PithHelmet to block those flash adverts; PithHelmet goes a bit further and blocks almost all adverts. It works well, but does get in the way sometimes. This didn’t bother me, but it is very closely tied to the version of Safari it is released for. Upgrade Safari and you have to get a new version of PithHelmet, which often means waiting for the new version to release.
Since upgrading to the new, very quick Safari 4 I was without PithHelmet. I resorted to turning plug-ins off in the browser to avoid the flash adverts, but this meant toggling the preference every time I wanted to view a page with a plug-in object. So I did a little searching and discovered ClickToFlash. ClickToFlash has the same concept as Flashblock, only it looks a little nicer, is a little more configurable, and even has special YouTube handling. You can tell ClickToFlash to load the H.264 file from YouTube rather than the flash version, which also means you can download the video file if you so desire.
I highly recommend ClickToFlash for Safari users on Mac OS X.
Very informative Ryan. I also have started using the new Safari and with my light internet at home this ClickToFlash might help with loading times and such.
Cheers.