Flash website management on a Windows Terminal Server

Question

situation: 100users, over a dozen sites, all connected by thinclients to Windows Terminal servers on various 1.5/256 or 2m/2m links.

I have currently blocked the loading of flash content on websites in IE7 by group policy, to preserve bandwidth - ThinClients are not too good at rendering streaming video. This has been fine for the past 4 years, but now, more and more websites are neglecting to offer up non flash content in lieu to browse their sites.

Firefox has a plug-in to allow the user to CLICK ON flash content containers, to have them load on demand, but the plugin doesn't play nicely for all users and has to be added manually by each user it seems - anyone on a termserv environment done this?

is there any other options you know of that will make this possible (ie: to only load individual flash content on demand by the user, and therefor they will understand why their session is slow)? What about another browser? I have played with Opera, and Chrome, (but Chrome doesn't load on my terminal servers nicely, graphics appear truncated)

Or, is there a way to make flash content play nicely on lowspec, low bandwidth thin clients?

Any hints or tips for young players?

Answer 1

So first off, I do not like Firefox in any way for a TS environment. For us at least we have had nothing but heartache. The day that tabs came to IE, my life became easier because my users would then use IE.

My thought is this, find a plugin for IE that allows you to do the same thing you are doing in Firefox. One I found with a quick search is called "Flash and Pics Control". The browser gets a new button and one of the options listed is the "enable/disable flash content". This is browser specific instead of by the site, meaning once turned on, surfing to other websites would still have flash enabled until they uncheck the box.

I have no idea how well this software works or if it works in TS. All I did was run "ie flash plugin" on yahoo, and saw what came up. Let me know if this is the solution you are looking for and I will look for other plugins and post them in the comments on this post.