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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."
Every time I have used Flash on my Ubuntu, mostly for playing videos, I must manually use the `top` and `kill` command or Chrome's task manager to manually kill the npviewer.bin process. Flash always eats more than 50% of my CPU even long after I have closed all web pages using Flash, only killing it will bring my CPU back to idle and shuts off the noisy laptop fan. There is huge difference in power consumption between an idle CPU and running CPU, that's why for laptop it is best to keep the CPU idle most of the time to save power.
Now having to kill the Flash process manually is not user friendly at all. I'd imagine that average joes can't do anything on it and have no idea that Flash is the one that causing their laptop fan spinning, heating up, and soaking battery powers.
At least two HTML5 implementations are now indirectly threaded, so it won't stall a core like Flash does when you open 5 heavy tabs.
Also the problem with Flash is its history of inefficiency for even simple operations. The problem here isn't the ads (that's another problem), the problem is their performance. WebGL is currently doing stuff Flash can't dream of, and that will only improve (unlike Flash).
Bad JavaScript sucks nearly as hard as bad ActionScript, but at least we have tools to debug and selectively disable JavaScript, because JS is implemented by the browser and not some external runtime.
There is no reason a browser can't implement actions to assist the user in this area, like to optionally shut down a JS script when it stalls the CPU for 5 seconds, or to disable selected animations by right-clicking on them. Will Adobe ever add assistance like the these examples? Fuck no they won't, they've had 10 years of complete inaction.
Ironically, this is not because of the Flash technology itself - as many here might believe, the Flash plug-in binary is incredibly well optimized and does many things so well that would otherwise require GPU-like acceleration. The problem here is that the Adobe editing software allows those non-tech educated "artist" (who create that graphics) to do such a mess with the resources, clogged rendering pipeline and a total misuse of every feature imaginable. They have absolutely no clue what is going on technologically underneath their creations and it shows.
Ask yourself the flip question - at what point can you stop carrying your AC adapter (assuming you're not on a multi-day trip)? I've stopped carrying mine, which means I've stopped carrying the laptop bag and associated weight. Now a 3lb laptop really is 3lb, and you can use it more like a notebook.