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Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life
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."
Block all flashes by default but allow user to enable one specifically. Problem solved.
It couldn't be Apple, who has been impartial to Flash, and welcoming of it on their platform... ...oh, wait.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
... web ads can rob 2 hours from a macbook air's life, the main reason why the battery lasts longer in the no-flash case is because the ads aren't loaded, once all ads move to HTML5 I don't think there'll be that much of a difference.
-- the cake is a lie
Using the computer might drain your battery!
Wow, that's... news.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Because Safari works far better than FF on OS X?
It's great that someone is finally recognizing this sort of stuff. Think of the millions of kwh wasted all over the world every day running flash on laptops and desktops...not to mention the security issues involved with the 'active' content that the flash player brings to the system. All of this comes from an unlovely company that does not seem to shoulder any responsibility for the software that it looses upon the user community. Okay Adobe, mod this troll, but you can't stop everyone from eventually seeing the light.
But then you have Quicktime installed, which means you have iTunes installed. No thanks. And people think Adobe software is bloated
If you're going to report one uptime as being "6:02", don't just report the other as being "4 hours". Tell us if it was 4:01 or 4:00 or whatever.
When your difference is on the order of 120 minutes, 1 or 2 minutes difference either way is indeed notable.
And if this test was done over wireless, I wonder how much the browser cache played a role. No need to refetch content, right? Did he even make sure all pages served him the same ads?
This is Mythbusters-levels of bad science.
Reinstall Flash and install adblock. Then the story changes to "Ads Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life". But not many ad-supported websites would run with that title, would they?
This is a complete non-story. It's no surprise that replacing animated content with a static image improves battery life. I would prefer more websites used static content for their ads rather than Flash content. Then maybe I wouldn't block them so much. With AdBlock, having Flash installed makes no difference to how long my battery lasts - but it does make a difference to what I can do on the web.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
You mean running animations in the background on multiple pages eats CPU cycles??? Oh noes! Geez, I wonder how Jobs' little darling, HTML5, will manage to do animations without using any CPU power?
I swear every day it's another retarded "report" about something equally as retarded.
How about you blame the ad companies for using Flash rather than blame Adobe for making an interactive product meant to enhance web content(which you admit it does)? Or blame the browser companies for not giving the options and/or making it more obvious that dynamic content is being used? Smith and Wesson makes guns. Are they at fault when some gangbanger kills another with a S&W?
Flash was fine back in the days when users kept only one or two browser windows open but now that everyone has tens or hundreds of tabs/windows open at any one time the CPU cost for Flash is too much to pay. Partly this is a problem with the way browsers work where every tab/window executes all plugins whether or not the tab/window has focus, but partly this is a design problem because even though the day of one or two windows/tabs are long gone, web designers still populate every page with as much bouncy, blinky annoying bullshit as possible as if they and only they had any right to my CPU.
I agree. Flash on Linux has never been a particularly pleasant experience either. If only the browser could tell the Flash engine to shut the fuck up if the tab isn't visible, things would be much better. Not fixed, mind you, but better.
You think saying the people who have the software installed that is necessary to view half the video on the web have no brains might be flamebait?
Gee, really?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/html5_video_market_penetration.php
and you've been saying it since a long time ago?
So you just don't believe in online video at all, then.
unlike Flash, the browser makers can actually address HTML5 performance issues.
Those who have it are the majority, those who don't are the minority. I'm sorry Big Steve was so butthurt that he couldn't get an agreement working with Adobe for his iToys and Flash. The fact is that if you want to reach the most people possible with rich web content, Flash is the current solution. HTML5 is iffy and buggy, and JavaScript is slow and old.
Jobs and Apple want to decry Flash and say "It's a hog, it's inferior!" but they have yet to propose one acceptable substitute. "Turn it off and browse with static images only, 90s-style!" is not the answer I'm looking for.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
So - FFox and Flashblock for the win...
I use both on my AO751h (+ABP), and a 9 cell battery gets me ~10 hours of use, streaming video or whatever. And no damned "Punch the Monkey" ads. Don't see why the same wouldn't work on/for Macs...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
I can get days worth of battery life on my laptop if I don't do anything on it.
Seriously, all of these long battery life claims are idiotic. If you get that much life from yours, it only indicates that you bought more computer than you actually needed and that it's sitting idle most of the time.
Yes it does. Firefox seriously sucks on Mac OS X, no matter what you OSS fanboys want to believe.
there is no correlation between battery life and computer necessity relative to time.
Adobe makes a shitty product, and corporations use that shitty product to make the web worse. Yes, I do blame those corporations, and I don't buy their products; I am free to also blame Adobe for selling feces for companies to throw. If gun companies built their weapons so poorly they commonly exploded during target practice, you can bet I'd sure as fuck blame them.
No, I didn't say Flash enhances web content; you'd have to define "enhance" as meaning to add noticeable things few people want; Flash enhances the web like herpes enhances vaginas. Flash could disappear from the face of the planet, and there wouldn't be a single negative from it. Hulu should change formats, and in that case they'd finally get off their ass and do it. How sad is it for Adobe that Silverlight (on OS X, no less) is way better and more reliable than Flash? If Flash wasn't designed and built for shit, I wouldn't mind it at all. The only reason why I mind it isn't the ads -- it's that it's pure utter crap that is so terribly made that it actually manages to make the web a worse place purely for technological failings (i.e., not due to content) and its effect on my computers.
A day of classes at a university where there curiously often aren't electrical outlets in CS classrooms.
Troll does not mean "opinion you find disagreeable."
FF really does suck on the mac.
I was a happy Firefox user for years, before finally switching to Safari when FF became more than unresponsive.
The problem, according to the many help forums, was I had "too many extensions" installed, and that I should "create a new profile".
I resented being punished for using the extensions system that Mozilla so heavily promoted, so I switched.
And now I've got AdBlock back, and use ClickToFlash, 2 extensions which installed right from the web page with no restart required. Now I'm a happy Safari user.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
iTunes does not have to use the centralised registry - every application can create its own independent registry hive containing just its data within the users Application Data folder. Hell, iTunes could even use pLists if it damn well chose.
So no, the architecture of Windows is not to blame at all here for iTunes, its all Apple all the way.
Anyone who has ever worked as a contractor, when you get "hot desked" around a lot and never know if you're going to be stuck in a meeting room for the day with 9 other developers sharing 4 plugs, instantly understands the benefit of a ridiculously long charge time.
"just don't hold it like that!" lol
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a dozen times, I must be an Apple customer!
As the article says - the cause of the problem is advertising.
If the user wants to watch flash videos in youtube, it drains the battery just as much as watching downloaded videos on the video playe of his choice.
But if the user doesn't want the "content", then the system shouldn't spend valuable, scarce resources (such as battery life) on them - the solution is not disabling flash, the solution is to ship computers with AdBlock preinstalled and preconfigured. The computer vendors can and should do that, to improve the value of their product to consumers.