When you visit a media-rich website, it takes a longer time and more bandwidth before it gets loaded finally in your web browser. This is because such sites often make use of Adobe Flash plugins and many other such plugins to load the interactive data. But this means that you have to wait a little longer before the site is fully loaded, even if you are not going to use those interactive media snippets. If you do not want this to happen and want to save your internet bandwidth, then you can disable the plugins. But this requires a restart of your browser. If you are a Firefox user, then you have a much better option – to set these plugins in the “Ask to Activate” state. This way you have to click on the Activate button before these plugins start loading their content – making websites faster and reducing unnecessary data download.
Here is how you can change the plugins state in the Firefox web browser:
- First of all, type about:addons in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. This will open a list of all the extensions installed in your Firefox browser.
- But we are not interested in browser extensions, we want to work on the plugins. For this you have to click on the Plugins section in the left-side of the Firefox add-ons page. Now, you will be able to see all the plugins installed for Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Against each plugin, Firefox automatically selects an activation option – Always Activate, Never Activate or Ask to Activate. But you can also change this activation option for any plugin yourself. The “Always Activate” will keep the plugin activated all the time. The “Never Activate” option will effectively disable that plugin from being used – without showing any plugin missing or install plugin message. The “Ask to Activate” option shows you a simple Activate button in the plugin area, clicking on which you can activate the plugin anytime you want.
These activation state options can help you be more productive when using the Firefox web browser. You can disable those plugins that consume time to load and make Firefox sluggish by choosing the “Never Activate” option for them. Similarly, you can choose “Always Activate” for quick to load plugins that do not cause any performance problems in Firefox.