

Dropping Adobe Flash boosts Apple's MacBook Air battery life by 2 hours - sandipc
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/04/dropping_adobe_flash_boosts_apples_macbook_air_battery_life_by_2_hours.html

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zmmmmm
<sarcasm>Even more significantly, it was found that not turning on the MacBook
Air increased its battery life by 36 hours! Using this amazing data we are
able to infer that not using your computer saves battery life. The less you
use it, the more you save!</sarcasm>

This is more an argument for tools like Flashblock to be built into browsers
(like they are on Android) than it is an argument against Flash itself. You
can argue that Flash its inefficient but it's just as true that the tasks
Flash is used to do are intrinsically complex and power consuming.

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cma
"it's just as true that the tasks Flash is used to do are intrinsically
complex and power consuming"

Spinning, blinking, scaled moving sprite advertisements. I don't think those
are intrinsically power consuming; the GPU on most phones/laptops could handle
them (blind guess) 50x more power-efficiently than flash.

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widgetycrank
Isn't Flash 10.1 GPU-accelerated? Maybe that was just for videos. Though I
recall the Mac version using one of the Core libraries for vector graphics.

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metageek
I think only Windows gets the GPU acceleration, so far.

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rickmb
No surprises there. Flash on a Mac is a sick joke.

People who think Apple is just looking for excuses against Flash have never
used a Mac. The only time the fans kick in on any of Macs I've owned in the
past decade is when Flash is running. The only time any browser crashes it's
because of Flash. Flash eats memory, CPU and anything else it can lay it's
hands (okay, it leaves the disk alone) on until your Mac becomes either
unusable or it has drained the battery.

Flash is the closest thing to malware on a Mac. Anybody who thinks it would
have even been possible to have a usable version of Flash on an iPhone or iPad
grossly underestimates the incompetence of Adobe.

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stevenwei
I'm not sure this is particularly significant...as you could say the same
thing about many tasks.

Not running video encoding on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

Not running 3D games on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

Not watching 1080p movies on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

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msbarnett
I'm not sure that "browsing the internet and being shown advertisements on web
pages" should be considered a task whose intensiveness is on-par with 3D
rendering, 1080p decoding, or encoding.

Or rather, I think it isn't a flattering comment on Flash's efficiency that
having it display ads on webpages requires that much processing power.

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pavlov
I don't understand why people think Flash itself is somehow responsible for
content that is CPU-intensive (as evidenced by the number of upvotes on your
comment).

Flash is a Turing-complete runtime that executes 3rd party content, and the
environment that hosts Flash doesn't place any restrictions on how much
resources it can use. With such liberties, it's completely expected that some
people will produce banner ads that consume 99% of CPU time.

CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem, so getting rid of Flash wouldn't
solve anything. (You may think it does because you're running a Flash blocker,
but that's just because the offending content producers haven't migrated to
your preferred solution yet.)

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tomlin
It seems that if you own a Mac and like Flash you "need to be converted" in
the same way a dogmatic religious person sells you a life of enlightenment.

If you don't like Flash, fine. Just stop selling this fallacy that Flash has
some universal special power to drain battery power, or has some special
ability to empower the worst ads. It's patently absurd.

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Yaggo
Apparently you don't use a Macbook with Flash enabled. The difference is
significance. You don't even have to open Activity monitor to see it – you
_hear_ it.

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tomlin
This didn't fix that?
[http://www.osnews.com/story/23672/Adobe_Releases_Flash_for_M...](http://www.osnews.com/story/23672/Adobe_Releases_Flash_for_Mac_with_Hardware_Acceleration)

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beej71
Soon you'll be able to get the same battery life drops just by having
JavaScript turned on, as more advertisers move to HTML5.

~~~
ceejayoz
Flash tends to be a bear on Macs - even some basic YouTubing makes my 8-core
Mac Pro with 10 GB RAM turn all its fans on.

JavaScript, on the other hand, has seen a huge emphasis on performance, with
Google's work on V8 and the stuff Apple has been doing with Webkit. I strongly
suspect it'll be better performance than Flash.

~~~
ergo98
_I strongly suspect it'll be better performance than Flash._

There is absolutely no empirical basis for assuming this. In actual
comparisons between the two -- at least the tests that I've seen -- Flash take
the lead.

Removing Flash and being saved the overhead of endless and overbearing ads is
good, but as has been said the advertisers _will_ move to HTML5 (they already
are), and they're going to do the same full motion video, moving dynamic
multimedia, etc, that causes Flash to be such a beast. Worse, it won't be as
easily segregatable because to the browser it will be no different than the
rest of the web application.

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sp4rki
I can have one non-ad flash object on a webpage and it immediately makes my
fans spin like mad. What makes Flash be such a beast is not the advertisements
with full motion video or moving dynamic multimedia, it's just that Flash
completely and utterly sucks on a Mac.

On the other point, any website that lets advertisers take over their content
or more space than it should because there are no boundaries (as opposed to
Flash) is a website I won't visit anymore, and I suspect a great amount of
people think the same.

We have great advertisement providers as Fusion and Google are which are non
intrusive. If you wish to add banners and the such you as a content provider
should very well be on top of your ad space and avoid shady advertisement
companies.

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mkramlich
I suspect that many Flash apps have a loop running at a certain frequency,
which can have about the same performance impact of polling. Compared to an
event-driven architecture, a loop is always running, with each iteration
consuming CPU even if there is no real work to do that iteration. I had a
brief foray as a Flash programmer and noticed this pattern in some of the
codebases I saw, and in what the Flash IDE seems to push. Not sure how widely
spread it is, or done any measurements on impact, however. But it has the
potential to contribute to the CPU sponging the Flash browser plugin is
notorious for. Take this effect, multiple it by many little Flash apps per
tab, many tabs, many windows, and it can add up.

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kreek
While it is true that some Flash apps have loop (games must have a loop) it's
a bit ignorant to compare it to an event-driven architecture. Flash's
ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript (as is JavaScript), is an event
driven-architecture. Events are first class citizens of the framework and
bubble up through the display list. Even the loop that gets abused by so many
is firing off events.

~~~
mkramlich
> While it is true that some Flash apps have loop (games must have a loop)
> it's a bit _ignorant_ to compare it to an event-driven architecture.

not sure if you meant it, but that comes off as pretty rude.

loops and EDA's are different things, and there is value in comparing and
considering them. also, the Flash API's may have first-class support for the
notion of events, but that does not mean that every glorified loop involves
events, or vice versa. in a pure EDA, no task is performed unless an event of
interest occurs. mindless polling and housekeeping loops are one anti-pattern
contributing to unnecessary CPU use.

also, while we're being pedantic, technically not all games require loops.
I've built plenty myself that had no loops in the application code.

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rm-rf
Running NoScript and only enabling javascript and flash when needed likely has
a similar effect. The advantage, of course is that with Flash installed but
disabled, you can enable/disable it as desired and as battery permits.

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geuis
You know, what you say brings to mind an interesting point. Right now most
people ~98% I think, have javascript enabled all the time. Its a smaller
minority of us that use NoScript.

There are no mechanisms that I know of in popular browsers to disable certain
html5 features like canvas, video, or audio elements.

So while its possible right now to disable Flash by not installing it or using
certain browser extensions, if an ad provider loads an ad that uses the video
or audio element you really have no way to disable them. Disabling javascript
should prevent canvas-based ads from running, but what's to stop video and
audio playing if your browser supports autoplay?

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w1ntermute
No doubt extensions will be created (or more likely, support will be added to
the existing Flash- and/or ad-blocking extensions) if this becomes a
significant problem.

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swah
Its just the Mac Flash implementation, no? Many tabs with Flash content don't
make Windows slow IIRC.

