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."

Comments

Why not install Flashblock by default

[microbee]

Block all flashes by default but allow user to enable one specifically. Problem solved.

I think this should be read more like...

[MarcoAtWork]

... 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.

In other news...

[JReykdal]

Using the computer might drain your battery!

Flash ads are CPU hogs.

[pushing-robot]

Wow, that's... news.

Re:No ABP in OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Safari works far better than FF on OS X?

Friends don't let friends run flash

[dtjohnson]

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.

Re:Friends don't let friends run flash

[dudpixel]

there is nothing about flash (the format) that is all that bad. sure the implementation could be a LOT better, including the plugin, but I think for what it is and considering how long it has been around, its not all bad. Until now, there hasn't been an equivalent on the web, at least not with the same market share. Up until recently, if you wrote a website using flash, you could deliver a rich multimedia experience to a very wide audience. What other choices did you have? not all websites are just about information and plain text.

I think flash is now reaching end of life, sure, but I also think it has served a purpose, while we wait for web standards to catch up and fully support rich content online.

One day the web will be an extension of what our desktops can already do...but that day is still a way off...and no HTML5 isn't going to fix this overnight.

Flash isn't the problem...

[Zouden]

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.

Wow

[WillyWanker]

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.

Re:news?

[bhcompy]

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?

Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study?

[nedlohs]

Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.

Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study?

[mcrbids]

Augh! Enough!

Flash isn't perfect, I'll grant that. But if Flash didn't solve a very real set of problems, it wouldn't be installed on 98% of all computers made!

Go back just 1 year. Want to watch a video, online, what tool do you use? Want to make an interactive, graphically rich application to deliver via the Internet, what tool do you use?

See what I'm saying? Sure, flash has its warts. But it does neatly solve a problem that even HTML 5 doesn't do all that well at, yet. And the cost is a bit of CPU time, which has traditionally been considered cheap....

How many conversations have been ended with: "No need to rewrite your PHP application in C - Hardware is cheap!"? It's the same conversation with Flash! It's highly abstract, platform independent, looks nice, and performs better than any other product available (still!) given these requirements.

I'm not saying that it couldn't be done better, but even with HTML 5, there still isn't a tool with a better overall combination of features and availability. (Hint: my small company's online training videos are all delivered with flash and FlowPlayer because it actually works - HTML 5 is not even close to universally available, yet)