News - Browsing with Flash knocks third off MacBook Air battery life

[HEXUS]

Tests show Apple’s decision not to preload plugin pays off in endurance.

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[scaryjim]

I don't think this will surprise many people on hexus tbh - the ads on here are sometimes attrociously inefficient (I remember a motorola ad some time ago that was hitting my 2GHz Core 2 Duo with around 50% CPU usage...)

Nice to see it quantified though: I'll definitely have to put some thought into whether I want flash on my laptops - it's just a shame that so much content is delivered via flash nowadays...

[aidanjt]

That's why I've installed flashblock on Chrome. Each ad will literally fill 100% of a CPU core (the Linux and Mac flash plugins are much less efficient than the Windows plugin), which is murder for battery life and longevity and strains my hardware unnecessarily. I'm sorry, I'm not destroying my laptop for any site.

[miniyazz]

This is a compelling reason to be using Adblock on a laptop, TBH. I know many sites depend on the revenue, but if laptop users are moving to block ads because of the drain on battery life, surely revenues could be better raised by switching to less resource-intensive ads? Google does text ads, for example. Or perhaps banner ads that are replaced by text ads if adblock is used?

[Spud1]

As scaryjim says, this is far from a surprise..it's well known that flash is appallingly inefficient, and its the biggest reason I don't have it installed on any of my mobile devices.

Even before this test you could do some fun things to prove this - on my old macbook, and my current laptop (when i had flash installed), you could browse the web, watch HD movies etc..fans would never once come on audibly.

Navigate to any website containing flash content however, and the fans would turn on full blast, and the laptop starts to get very hot.

Use the same machine and load a silverlight app for example, or try playing some HTML 5 content..no problem whatsoever.

Flash was great in its day when it had no competition, but its past it now..it's been surpassed by much better technologies and should be consigned to the past in my opinion.

Just as an afterthought - it's interesting how the "story" that Apple is not shipping flash pre-installed with ios/osx is picked up by all the tech press, when Microsoft has never included it with windows, and most linux distributions don't either, but it never gets mentioned

[redddraggon]

Does any know any recommended flashblocker for Firefox and chrome?

Or is it just best just to remove flash from the laptop totally?

[aidanjt]

"Flashblock" on Chrome is pretty much perfect IMHO.

[redddraggon]

I see that Youtube is going to html5, so flash is going to become pretty much unnecessary son anyway.

[aidanjt]

Flash was great in its day when it had no competition, but its past it now..it's been surpassed by much better technologies and should be consigned to the past in my opinion.

Even the technologies preceding it were much much better solutions. The vast majority of Flash ads can easily be done in animated gif, and/or apng could have been finished off, embedded video >>>>>>>>>>> flash video, always has been, same with embedded audio files, etc, etc. Static HTML with cgi/php/asp/etc backends are also far superior to flash applications (which depend on those backends anyway). Why anyone thought Flash was a good idea in the first place is well beyond me.

Just as an afterthought - it's interesting how the "story" that Apple is not shipping flash pre-installed with ios/osx is picked up by all the tech press, when Microsoft has never included it with windows, and most linux distributions don't either, but it never gets mentioned

Yeah, I was wondering about that myself, seems a bit lopsided. And I don't harbour any love for Apple at all.

[Spud1]

Why anyone thought Flash was a good idea in the first place is well beyond me.

Ease of use I think - it was so so simple to build a flash movie, or a flash game..whilst actionscript is awful it is incredibly simple to get going with, so you could build up impressive looking graphics/adverts/games in no time. Simple things were doable with zero programming knowledge or any use of actionscript.

Problem was people took it too far and wrote too much in it (remember the 100% flash websites that were popular for a time..eww), and its become something of a standard on the internet, when it really shouldn't have been. Kudos to Adobe for making that happen though, its an impressive feat.

[BullDogg]

Just as an afterthought - it's interesting how the "story" that Apple is not shipping flash pre-installed with ios/osx is picked up by all the tech press, when Microsoft has never included it with windows, and most linux distributions don't either, but it never gets mentioned

I could be wrong - no time to research right now - but I think Windows used to ship with Flash. Not for a good few years, but I'm almost certain I read that just the other day.

I agree, it is lopsided, but nothing gets people riled up like a good story about Apple being Apple-y

[aidanjt]

I could be wrong - no time to research right now - but I think Windows used to ship with Flash. Not for a good few years, but I'm almost certain I read that just the other day.

Yeah, that's right, Microsoft used to bundle the ActiveX plugin. Back in the Macromedia days, when everyone called it 'shockwave flash', and practically nobody used it. :\

Odd way to go about things, but still

[duc]

Do Flash adverts like video take advantage of GPU acceleration?

[cameronlite]

Do Flash adverts like video take advantage of GPU acceleration?

I can't imagine that there is a lot of GPU acceleration. If there is, could hexus please include the frame rates of flash adverts in the Nvidia 580 review?

[TheAnimus]

There is something more than this, most websites that people care about (youtube asside) are rather static.

That is to say we don't want javascript wasting CPU cycles, we don't want things flashing on the screen. Flash asside this is about the websites funding mechanisim costing us in battery life.

If people use animated gifs on OSX there is no hardware acceleration iirc, if they use javascript and transform the images that way even less.