Then don’t install flash!
That is the degree of freedom that I appreciate. Not so much Flash that bank/shop/gov. sites expect anyone to have it.
And not so little that all the, er, uninteresting-to-me stuff now in Flash is rendered in unavoidable HTML5 standards. (Note to self: save a copy of an ancient browser.)
Firefox without Flash does OK for me now, for the rest of the stuff that needs javascript and images. I doubt it will be possible to tune it properly (short of hosts file munging) if all Flash migrates to HTML5.
And of course it's a bit unwieldy to keep multiple browsers around - Konqueror 3.x also shows me a convenient 'open link in Firefox' option, but that's it. And I don't think this kind of fiddly options will be exactly first priority.
We'll see in a couple of years, I guess.
P.S.
The 'canvas' animation in the page linked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252899 pegs one core of my Linux machine with Firefox 3.5.
I just tested, and it does the same with image loading turned off. Must also turn off javascript to make it stop (duh, must be a js busy-wait doing it).
(I seem to recall a line about 'depending on the kindness of strangers', not really an enviable situation.)
Now HTML5 is going to have to deal with the problem and they we'll have to wait until browsers make their own implementation of a solution that will probably be similar to Adobe's eventual solution.