To disable Flash, you would have to enter about:addons in the address bar and wait for the add-on manager to load. You then had to switch to the plugins listing, locate Adobe Flash Player there and click on the enable or disable button. JavaScript and the loading of images on the other hand are not found there. For that you would have to open the Firefox options to make the changes.

Way more comfortable than that is a browser extension like QuickJava which adds those capabilities directly to the main Firefox interface.

The QuickJava extension adds six buttons to the Firefox status bar. A click on a button disables or enables the following features or plugins in the browser:

• JavaScript
• Java
• Adobe Flash
• Microsoft Silverlight
• Images
• Css

Enabled features are displayed in blue, disabled ones in red which makes the distinction easier. A right-click on a button and the selection of Options opens a configuration menu. You can use the menu to hide buttons so that they are not displayed on the status bar. This is handy if you only need quick access to some buttons instead of all of them.

You can use the options to add a seventh button to the status bar. The Proxy server button is hidden by default, and you need to enable it in the options to quickly turn on or off proxy server support in Firefox.

That’s all for now that you can do in the extension’s options. You can middle-click any of the status bar icons of the extension to reverse all settings. This way you can turn everything off if everything is turned on and vice verse.

QuickJava can be installed directly from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. It is compatible with all versions of Firefox from 4 onwards.

The interface is tab driven and one of the tabs provides access to the list of plugins. You might be surprised about the amount of plugins listed on the page. Each plugin is either shown as enabled or disabled. The enabled plugins are highlighted while the disabled plugins are grayed out a bit to visualize the difference nicely.

A button to enable or disable the plugin is provided after clicking on a specific plugin. The amount of plugins shown in the menu might surprise some users who never looked into there before.

The test system contained plugins for iTunes, Google Update, Microsoft DRM, Java, Microsoft Office, Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight, Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Media Player and Windows Presentation Foundation. That’s a lot of plugins of which most are probably superfluous.