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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.
... 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.
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.
unlike Flash, the browser makers can actually address HTML5 performance issues.
There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets. But I'd like to point out the biggest impact isn't the battery life, it's your crotch. Flash forces laptops to run extremely hot and it invariably burns your nads while you rewind Lady Gaga videos for the 20th time in a row.
The reason why male sack is situated in-between legs is because it needs to remain a certain temperature to function properly. Evolution never anticipated humans putting hot slabs of electronics on their privates for extended periods of time.
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).
No it doesn't.
This little benchmark even proves it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.
Tinfoil hats don't work, you know. You need a copper faraday cage hat.
there is no correlation between battery life and computer necessity relative to time.
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.
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.
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)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets.
The problem isn't just Flash, the problem is complicated and interactive ads, which is what advertisers push for (because they work). It doesn't matter which technology is being used, be it HTML5 or Flash, it's still going to suck up CPU time.
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
Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.
Oh, yeah? How do you explain evolution anticipating wrist watches by providing us with wrists, pal? Or anticipating the infernal earphones from Apple by provided us with convenient bumps and crags on the ear lobe for it to hang on to?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact