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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."

5 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. I think this should be read more like... by MarcoAtWork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

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    -- the cake is a lie
  2. Flash ads are CPU hogs. by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, that's... news.

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    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  3. Friends don't let friends run flash by dtjohnson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Flash isn't the problem... by Zouden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    "A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
  5. Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.