Adblock Plus

The FAQ states:

Adblock Plus has an option called "Show tabs on Flash and Java". When activated (the default) it will display a button saying “Block” at the upper right (lower right if there isn’t enough space) corner of every object.

Lot's of times I've seen ads I want to block and the 'tab' is not there. Right clicking also only shows "Settings..." and "About Adobe Flash Player 9". However, I've just discovered that this 'tab' can be pretty far away from the object. In one case on www.washingtonpost.com, a banner at the top of the page had it's block tab halfway down the page in another ad for the same company.

Is there any way to improve the placement of the tab?

That's probably https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=12910 - the object tabs are there but they are cut off due to page's layout. Unfortunately it is very hard to do something about it, you will have to open the list of blockable elements in these cases and look for objects there.

I just watched the home page of www.tvguide.com come up. For a fraction of a second I saw a 'block' tab about a quarter way down the page sitting by itself that was then covered up by other elements on the page.
This may have been the block tab for the banner across the top of the page that was the first thing to appear.

I'm finding that about half of the flash ads I want to block (especially the annoying ones that are continuously animated, or the ones that 'push' pages down when they appear at the top) have no 'block' tabs anywhere to be found. As a naive user I cannot make heads or tails of the 30 or so entries that appear when I open the list. So I'm stymied.

I'm not sure why the 'block' tab cannot be made more visible and be right in the ad itself instead of on the border?

Because you cannot put anything on top of Flash - this area is painted directly by the Flash plugin, the browser has no access to it. This should change in Firefox 3.0, maybe then we can have a better solution.