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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.
...but my computer ran out of batteries and I had to find an outlet.
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?
Flash will suck the life out of a battery charge on my MacBook Pro, too, as well as every non-Apple laptop that I've owned recently, too. Interestingly, I don't have that issue if I watch a "raw" mp4 via the QuickTime plugin.
Not blocking it selectively with noscript, flashblock etc. sucks the Battery.
Why is this news? Flash is actively drawn and persistent. It's also known that it is CPU intensive. It's like running a DVD or a videogame. It takes extra CPU cycles and possibly extra components(does Flash utilize a GPU/FPU?) to accomplish these types of things. In a word, duh.
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.
...viewing TFA caused a Flash popover ad to appear over the article text. Just sayin'.
Why would ANYONE use Safari on Mac when you have FF? ABP and NoScript for the win!
Ummm, AdBlock is now available for Safari, and Click2Flash neatly dispenses with Flash.
But, the battery-sucking aspect of Flash is old news.
You can get AB and a flash blocker for Safari, among other things. https://extensions.apple.com/
?
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"
"I've be trying to stop Flash for years!" - The Shade
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Everyone knows the glowing Apple logo is powered by a Mac user's smug sense of superiority!
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
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.
Introducing:
The Macbook Shuffle: This Changes Everything Including the Magic!
Safari, adblock + click2flash, and I get 7 1/2 hours of run time on my Macbook pro with wifi. Pretty sweet ;)
thinner than air.... Introducing the MacBook Vacuum
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
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.
V10.1.102.64 to fix security bugs and not the battery life and CPU issue. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What do you mean playing videos will run down your battery?! Now that's just absurd. Adobe needs to redesign Flash so that it charges up your battery.
No it doesn't.
This little benchmark even proves it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I wrote about this on my blog. Using my Watt's Up? meter I measured my computer's power usage at about 100W. But then I noticed that it was running at 160W for some reason. I eventually found the problem was flash player - and the only thing it was doing was a single ad on the travelocity web site. The ad was for - you guessed it - travelocity. And 15 years ago it would have been a 4 frame GIF because it simply flipped between 4 static images with no user interaction at all. Hooray Web 2.0
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 use NoScript. All Flash is blocked by default. I temporarily whitelist sites where I want something to play, and otherwise it doesnt run. I save the battery, skip the annoying ads, and still get to use YouTube. I paid a lot less for this laptop than I would for a MacBook Air to boot.
Not that they arent nice. But I think this study, while bringing up a definite truth, is an after-the-fact justification/spin for Apple, who blocked Flash for entirely different reasons.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Tinfoil hats don't work, you know. You need a copper faraday cage hat.
I dont use Flashblock so tell me, how exactly does it break hulu.com?
I do use NoScript, which does NOT break hulu.com. It simply improves the interface, allowing me to browse without a bunch of unwanted stuff starting inappropriately and grabbing control of my computer against my will. When I *want* to watch a video I temporarily whitelist it, the page reloads, and the video plays.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Alternatively, just uninstall Flash. You really don't need it for most of the web these days. (On OSX, it lives in /Library/Internet Plug-ins; you'll want to remove Flash Player.plugin, flashplayer.xpt, and the Shockwave file, I don't remember the name.)
Click2Flash is a great plugin, I used it for months. The problem with it is that it tells sites you have Flash installed; it just takes over for Flash and then releases content to the real plugin when you click on the box. The downside to that is that you prevent the site from sending alternate content which can be sent if your browser reports no Flash plugin.
For those sites that won't work any other way, load them in Chrome, which has an internal Flash renderer. When you're done you can quit Chrome and go back to your regular browser, with which you can write a note to the admin of the site you just visited asking them to get their head our of their ass and provide alternate content.
So if it uses that much less power on laptops then PC's must experience the same reduction in power consumption. It sounds to me like banning flash altogether might help in reducing carbon emissions.
This wasn't a troll, but I know I just stomped on an anthill...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I have heard this argument about HTML5 being buggy before. Describing a "standard" as being buggy shows a complete lack of understanding of what it actually is. Maybe the Internet Explorer implementation is buggy...
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
These are FLASH ads, the kind of animation early computers operating at mhz were capable of. For god sakes, we are talking banners that flash 2 small images. How can this require 100% CPU power on what is by alrights a super-super-computer.
Most of the time my computer busy running even such hogs as java and opera with tab icons 1 pixel in width barely reaches 4% cpu. But flash can bring the same machine to its knees.
It is the same with PDF. I can play a game that renders an entire world with super high textures made by fans for Fallout at break neck speed. But open a PDF and each page takes seconds to render and when browsing you constantly have to wait... WTF is wrong with the code?
Flash AND PDF either are the most horrible code ever written or they invite designers to make such horrendous choices that the most simple things take more computation then moddeling a nuclear explosion. ANd yes, nuclear explosions WERE modelled on machines far less powerful then your current desktop.
Just having flash banners during web browsing eats 1/3 of the battery power and you think that is just fine. My god, how wipped can you get. Would you accept the radio in your car sucking 1/3 of the fuel to give you ads as well?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
Please, I have used iTunes on both OS X and windows and although my primary OS at home is currently OS X, I was a windows user exclusively form 1996 until 2002 and I have an actual "paid" job as a software developer on the windows platform.
Based on my "REAL LIFE" experience with windows over the years including in the Windows XP beta program, I have noticed that the overall performance including boot times does tend to deteriorate over time regardless if you have iTunes installed. iTunes is not the culprit but rather a canary in the coal mine when your registry is corrupt or about to become corrupt. I have been able to improve the performance of my workstation at work by removing cached login profiles as it not only removed the directories but removes the registry trees for those users from your local workstation speeding up boot time and program loading.
Every time you boot up or every time you load program, windows has to scan the user settings for the currently logged in/logging in user in addition to program specific settings if you are running a program.
The Registry HIVE is a binary tree (Btrieve) database. Why you might think that it is magic and fairy dust that only loads in a small amount of information, the HIVE database has to be mounted and scanned and it will take considerably more memory and time to perform when you add new programs and/or users to the system.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.