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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."

4 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. No ABP in OSX? by hairyfeet · · Score: 0, Redundant

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

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. No surprise here. by clawhammer · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I needed a review to tell me this? Flash totally hikes the processor usage and thus increases heat, decreases battery life. I run ClickToFlash to block all the annoying ads, etc, but watching youtube or other video sites totally drains the battery. Rather annoying, and I can see why Steve Jobs hates flash. /fanboyism.

  3. Those savages by alangerow · · Score: 0, Redundant

    And how much battery life does the LCD screen rob? I bet OSX robs the battery of quite a bit of life, too. In fact, the entire laptop is a savage murderer of battery life!

  4. Re:Not just the Air by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Nah, QuickTime doesn't suck battery life, it just sucks.

    I don't think I've found a single build that didn't somehow bog down Windows or cause some sort of crash. Better to just leave QuickTime to the Macs.

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    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