I'm a web developer and sometimes I've found it necessary to uninstall flash to test my flash detection scripts for a website. Also, I know some people like to uninstall flash because they don't want to be bombarded with Flash ads. Here are some ways to uninstall flash.

There aren't any real easy ways to uninstall Flash and especially if you are using Internet Explorer. If you are using a Mozilla based browser like Firefox or Netscape it's really easy to uninstall. All you have to do is delete the "NPSWF32.dll" file in your plugins directory. I actually have Firefox and Netscape 4.75 installed and found that I had to delete "NPSWF32.dll" from my Netscape plug-in directory for flash not to work in Firefox as well as the plug-in directory for Firefox as well.

Plug-in Directories

If you are using IE you can manually uninstall Flash by removing the ActiveX control. Follow the steps in How to remove the Macromedia Flash Player ActiveX Control (TechNote 12727). You can also remove the Flash Player by downloading an uninstaller from Macromedia. Why Macromedia doesn't just include the uninstaller is beyond me. Hmm… maybe it isn't beyond me… They probably do it in order to make it harder to uninstall so they can increase their dominance.

For more information on uninstalling flash visit http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/remove_player.htm.

Also, if you use Firefox or a Mozilla based browser you can install FlashBlock by going to http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/flashblock. I've been using FlashBlock for a couple of days now and I think it works great. It makes it so that any flash object on a web page has a round play button that you have to push before you can see the flash. So if you go to a flash based site that you have to have flash to view the website you can push play or if you are on a website that has flash ads you can just leave the flash blocked.