How to Disable Adobe Flash Animations For All But White-Listed Sites in Internet Explorer 8

You can disable Adobe Flash animations in websites by disabling the Adobe Shockwave Flash Object using the Manage Add-ons dialog in Internet Explorer, or by setting a "kill-bit" in the registry. What if you want to enable Flash animations by default on a handful of sites (whitelist) but not on other sites? In Internet Explorer 7, only the developer of an ActiveX control could configure it as a per-site control, using the SiteLock ActiveX Control Template. In Internet Explorer 8, it’s possible for an end-user to enable ActiveX Controls on a per-site basis, via the Manage Add-ons dialog.

How to White-list Sites for Adobe Flash

1. Open Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, and select Manage Add-ons

2. Select All add-ons from the dropdown box

3. Double-click the Shockwave Flash Object.

By default, Flash ActiveX control is set to run on all sites.

4. Click the Remove all sites button, and close the dialog. This prevents Flash ActiveX control from running, for all sites.

5. Close the Manage Add-ons dialog

6. Browse to a website (e.g. youtube.com) for which you want to enable Flash animations. You’ll see the yellow information bar requiring your permission to run the control.

8. Click the information bar and choose Run Add-on.

The animation runs, and the current website is added to the white-list automatically. This will be reflected in the Manage Add-ons dialog, as well.

Registry Settings

The white-list data is stored in the following registry location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Ext \ Stats \ {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} \ iexplore \ AllowedDomains

Where {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} is the Class ID for Adobe Flash ActiveX Control. The Class ID varies for every ActiveX control.

The allowed sites are added as subkeys to the AllowedDomains key.

This key can be exported to a .REG file and deployed across other PCs using Group Policy.

One small request: If you liked this post, please share this?

One "tiny" share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this blog. Some great suggestions:
  • Pin it!
  • Share it to your favorite blog + Facebook, Reddit
  • Tweet it!
So thank you so much for your support. It won't take more than 10 seconds of your time. The share buttons are right below. :)
Tweet
Share18
Share
18 Shares

Ramesh Srinivasan is passionate about Microsoft technologies and he has been a consecutive ten-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in the Windows Shell/Desktop Experience category, from 2003 to 2012. He loves to troubleshoot and write about Windows. Ramesh founded Winhelponline.com in 2005.

...

4 thoughts on “How to Disable Adobe Flash Animations For All But White-Listed Sites in Internet Explorer 8”

  1. If only this was also possible for Javascript. But it’s not an addon so not possible I guess without an addon that disables it on blacklisted or whitelisted sites?

    Reply

  2. Very interesting, Ramesh, very interesting. If only there was a way to block certain sites and allow the rest…

    Of course, it is perhaps possible through adding blacklisted sites to Restricted Site Zone and then adjusting settings there properly.

    Reply

Leave a Reply