Are you using the about:permissions page to set site-specific plugin permissions? I wonder whether there's a glitch there.

Do either of these work better?

• The lego-like icon in the address bar?
• Page Info dialog > Permissions tab?

Those work, but only for single sites. However clicking the "plug-in area" when it's set to click-to-play brings up a pop-up dialog rather than playing it immediately, and clicking "allow now" seems to allow it until you restart the browser rather than just once.

Changing the permissions in "about:addons" seem to change it to click-to-play properly for all sites though.

Thank you for testing. I think choosing click-to-play /ask-to-activate on the Plugins tab of the Add-ons page (about:addons) is indeed the best starting point and may have been overriding the Permissions Manager.

Since the Permissions Manager is not so well documented, I'm not sure whether this should be filed as a bug (to align it better with the new plugin-by-plugin settings) or whether it isn't slated to catch up with the other dialogs. ?? Perhaps more research than either of us is inclined to do...

Do you know anything about those other things (popup dialog instead of playing immediately and allowing until you restart the browser). That's not how it used to work, is it?

Over the past few versions, Firefox has tried to give users more control over plugins. Usually that is implemented from the address bar (icon appears that looks like a piece of Lego) instead of an immediate pop-up, but I haven't really explored all of the different configurations.

If there is something you're missing about how it used to work before, what is your preferred style?

I'd prefer to have one click play and then play it just that once. That's how it used to work in Firefox, and even before Firefox got click to play that's how it worked with Flashblock and in other browsers.

I see, yes, for now, it's click any on the page to unblock all on the page.

The following thread discusses this change: Firefox 24 click to play flash plugin!!

To get FlashBlock-like behavior with the current Firefox, the thread suggests this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/

Thanks, that seems to do what i want. Though on YouTube, if you click on a video to play it and then click a link to another video the next video will play too, though if you reload the page the video will be blocked again.