Enable Click-to-Play Plugin To Save Bandwidth, Battery Life & Improve Browsing Speed

Enable Click-to-Play Plugin To Save Bandwidth, Battery Life & Improve Site Load Speed

If you often find yourself working on your laptop or tablet while mobile, there are at least two things you are always concerned about. They are Internet access and battery life on your device.

As far as the internet is concerned, you will no longer be able to access you work or home Wi-Fi. You will probably have to use mobile data plan by either tethering your smartphone or using its mobile data plan on your laptop or have one of those nifty portable (battery-powered) routers. For the battery life, the best you can do is to carry an extra fully-charged battery pack.

However, if you will be working online, there are some few tweaks you can do on your browser to save on battery life, bandwidth consumption, increase page load time and are reduce CPU usage. This tweak initially began as a Flash block on Firefox browser, but has become a standard feature in most of the popular browser nowadays.

Most modern browsers load Flash and other plug-in content whenever you open a web page. However, if you were to enable ‘Click-to-Play’ plug-in on your browser, it will instead load placeholder image until you click on download to view the content.

By enabling Click-to-Play, you browser will consume less bandwidth, improve the speed of page loads, use less power and reduce CPU usage.

Enable Click-to-Play Plugin in Popular Browsers

Google Chrome

Chrome browser comes with a built-in click-to-play feature, which works for all the plug-ins on the browser. To enable it, go to the Menu button>>Settings>>Settings page>>Show advanced settings>>Content settings under Privacy, and scroll down to Plug-ins and select the Click-to-play option.

If you are on the latest Chrome browser version, the setting will be called ‘Let me choose when to run plugin content.’

(Notice: Before you enable the above settings on Chrome browser, check the Manage Exceptions buttons shown in the screenshot above, this will override the setting. In Chrome, you will have to go to about:plugins and make sure that the ‘Always allowed to run’ is not enabled. This will override the click-to-play setting.)

Mozilla Firefox

Go to Tools>>Add-ons>>Plugins and from the drop-down menu, select Ask to Activate option. That should work; however, whenever you do upgrade there is always a chance the upgrade will flip back the settings.

Alternatively, you can install the Flash block extension on Firefox browser.

Opera

On Opera, go to Menu button>>Settings>>Websites. Then enable the Click to play option found under the Plug-ins.

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