Enabling click-to-play in Google Chrome

What is "click-to-play"?

Click-to-play is a feature that allows the browser to defer loading of plug-ins such as Flash and Java on a website until the user clicks on the plug-in.

My experience

After reading an article on Ars Technica about Mozilla's "click-to-play" feature in Firefox, I decided to look into how I could enable a similar feature in Google Chrome. After fiddling with my settings for a few minutes (and a bit of web searching), I can confidently confirm that the feature does indeed work, although not as one would think. Instructional articles dated a couple years back will have you enable a flag (chrome://flags) in addition to changing a setting in chrome://settings and disabling the desired plug-ins in chrome://plugins. First, the click-to-play flag is no longer present in current versions of Chrome. Second, disabling the plug-ins will turn them off completely rather than allowing the desired effect. All you have to do is enable click-to-play in Settings and you are good to go.

Enabling click-to-play

1. Click the wrench icon and click Settings.
2. In Under the Hood, click on Content Settings.
3. Scroll down to Plug-ins and click Click to play.