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Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life

Posted by timothy on from the less-frantic-scrambling dept.

The lack of Flash in the new MacBook Air may annoy some users, but it has a big upside, too. According to Wired's report (citing Ars Technica) passed on by an anonymous reader, "Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions."

9 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Not just the Air by bsDaemon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Flash will suck the life out of a battery charge on my MacBook Pro, too, as well as every non-Apple laptop that I've owned recently, too. Interestingly, I don't have that issue if I watch a "raw" mp4 via the QuickTime plugin.

    1. Re:Not just the Air by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Quicktime/iTunes isn't bad when ran on OS X because its pretty much native. Its bloated on Windows because it seems to think that rather than using the things that are already there, you need to install half of OS X to run a program.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:Not just the Air by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Informative

      On my laptop's Windows partition (Turion 64 x2, Windows XP pro installed, 2 GB of RAM) iTunes is nearly unusable and no, I don't have a lot of junk installed, the only thing other than essential Windows processes that was running was iTunes and it is close to unusable. VLC runs just fine on there, Foobar 2000 runs just fine on there, heck, Windows Media Player runs just fine on there but iTunes is a bloated piece of crap. The only reason I have it is that when I first bought my iPod touch it was the only way you could sync things to it. When you buy a song it takes longer to "process" the file than it does to download the song. And no, I'm not playing HD videos or anything through it, just syncing and playing some music. There is -no- excuse to why iTunes is such a piece of crap.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    3. Re:Not just the Air by Johnno74 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wow, nice straw man. The registry has nothing to do with itunes suckiness. Itunes is bloated and slow. its a what, 100mb download for a fancy media player and organiser. Winamp, foobar2000, mediamonkey and pretty much every other media player I've used over the years are tons lighter, quicker and just plain work better.

      I mean, itunes can't even automatically pick up new media you put in the media folder on your computer.

      FWIW, the registry is NOT slow. And you don't have to "open the database" to get each setting. When you log on your registry hive is loaded into memory, and its pretty quick. However, it does suck having a bunch of programs settings stored in one binary file, and file associations on windows do suck.

  2. Having it installed cuts the Battery? by drolli · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not blocking it selectively with noscript, flashblock etc. sucks the Battery.

  3. Re:No ABP in OSX? by Bassman59 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why would ANYONE use Safari on Mac when you have FF? ABP and NoScript for the win!

    Ummm, AdBlock is now available for Safari, and Click2Flash neatly dispenses with Flash.

    But, the battery-sucking aspect of Flash is old news.

  4. Re:I think this should be read more like... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, because decoding H.264 is so much less CPU intensive...

    You're trying to be facetious, but in my experience that's actually true - and that shows what a dog Flash is.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  5. FYI: Updated Flash released today. by antdude · · Score: 4, Informative

    V10.1.102.64 to fix security bugs and not the battery life and CPU issue. ;)

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  6. Re:No ABP in OSX? by pknoll · · Score: 4, Informative

    Alternatively, just uninstall Flash. You really don't need it for most of the web these days. (On OSX, it lives in /Library/Internet Plug-ins; you'll want to remove Flash Player.plugin, flashplayer.xpt, and the Shockwave file, I don't remember the name.)

    Click2Flash is a great plugin, I used it for months. The problem with it is that it tells sites you have Flash installed; it just takes over for Flash and then releases content to the real plugin when you click on the box. The downside to that is that you prevent the site from sending alternate content which can be sent if your browser reports no Flash plugin.

    For those sites that won't work any other way, load them in Chrome, which has an internal Flash renderer. When you're done you can quit Chrome and go back to your regular browser, with which you can write a note to the admin of the site you just visited asking them to get their head our of their ass and provide alternate content.