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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."

12 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.

    --
    -- the cake is a lie
    1. Re:I think this should be read more like... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, because decoding H.264 is so much less CPU intensive...

      You're trying to be facetious, but in my experience that's actually true - and that shows what a dog Flash is.

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      #DeleteChrome
  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. And, predictably... by colenski · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...viewing TFA caused a Flash popover ad to appear over the article text. Just sayin'.

    1. Re:And, predictably... by The+Wild+Norseman · · Score: 5, Funny

      ...viewing TFA caused a Flash popover ad to appear over the article text. Just sayin'.

      Yeah, that's okay, I still have just enough battery left to fini

      --
      "A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
  5. Re:No ABP in OSX? by Bassman59 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. 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"
  7. Re:Not just the Air by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Quicktime/iTunes isn't bad when ran on OS X because its pretty much native. Its bloated on Windows because it seems to think that rather than using the things that are already there, you need to install half of OS X to run a program.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  8. Kill Manually by crf00 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? by Renderer+of+Evil · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.