Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life 509
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."
Why not install Flashblock by default (Score:5, Insightful)
Block all flashes by default but allow user to enable one specifically. Problem solved.
Who would stand to benefit from such a study? (Score:3, Insightful)
It couldn't be Apple, who has been impartial to Flash, and welcoming of it on their platform... ...oh, wait.
I think this should be read more like... (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.
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash ads are CPU hogs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, that's... news.
Re:No ABP in OSX? (Score:4, Insightful)
Friends don't let friends run flash (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.
Re:Not just the Air (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Flash isn't the problem... (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.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I swear every day it's another retarded "report" about something equally as retarded.
Re:news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is past its sell by date (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I know I'm going to get "Flamebait" .... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [readwriteweb.com]
and you've been saying it since a long time ago?
So you just don't believe in online video at all, then.
not really (Score:3, Insightful)
unlike Flash, the browser makers can actually address HTML5 performance issues.
Re:I know I'm going to get "Flamebait" .... (Score:1, Insightful)
Those who have it are the majority, those who don't are the minority. I'm sorry Big Steve was so butthurt that he couldn't get an agreement working with Adobe for his iToys and Flash. The fact is that if you want to reach the most people possible with rich web content, Flash is the current solution. HTML5 is iffy and buggy, and JavaScript is slow and old.
Jobs and Apple want to decry Flash and say "It's a hog, it's inferior!" but they have yet to propose one acceptable substitute. "Turn it off and browse with static images only, 90s-style!" is not the answer I'm looking for.
Re:I think this should be read more like... (Score:4, 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.
Doubtful. The real problem is that Apple can't tweak the Flash runtime to be more CPU efficient. In contrast, they can do whatever they want to their Javascript and HTML engines.
This is also why I love Chrome. It buckets Flash into a separate process, so when Ads start hogging the CPU, I kill the Flash process.
Re:I think this should be read more like... (Score:1, Insightful)
H.264 decoding is done in hardware on nearly all platforms, the exception being Flash when it is run on anything except Windows. This is why you get that result. They claim that Flash can use hardware decoding on other platforms but I have yet to see it actually work.
Re:No ABP in OSX? (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution never anticipated anything, full stop.
Re:I use that setup (Score:0, Insightful)
I can get days worth of battery life on my laptop if I don't do anything on it.
Seriously, all of these long battery life claims are idiotic. If you get that much life from yours, it only indicates that you bought more computer than you actually needed and that it's sitting idle most of the time.
Re:No ABP in OSX? (Score:0, Insightful)
Yes it does. Firefox seriously sucks on Mac OS X, no matter what you OSS fanboys want to believe.
Re:Friends don't let friends run flash (Score:5, Insightful)
there is nothing about flash (the format) that is all that bad. sure the implementation could be a LOT better, including the plugin, but I think for what it is and considering how long it has been around, its not all bad. Until now, there hasn't been an equivalent on the web, at least not with the same market share. Up until recently, if you wrote a website using flash, you could deliver a rich multimedia experience to a very wide audience. What other choices did you have? not all websites are just about information and plain text.
I think flash is now reaching end of life, sure, but I also think it has served a purpose, while we wait for web standards to catch up and fully support rich content online.
One day the web will be an extension of what our desktops can already do...but that day is still a way off...and no HTML5 isn't going to fix this overnight.
Re:I use that setup (Score:3, Insightful)
there is no correlation between battery life and computer necessity relative to time.
Re:news? (Score:0, Insightful)
No, I didn't say Flash enhances web content; you'd have to define "enhance" as meaning to add noticeable things few people want; Flash enhances the web like herpes enhances vaginas. Flash could disappear from the face of the planet, and there wouldn't be a single negative from it. Hulu should change formats, and in that case they'd finally get off their ass and do it. How sad is it for Adobe that Silverlight (on OS X, no less) is way better and more reliable than Flash? If Flash wasn't designed and built for shit, I wouldn't mind it at all. The only reason why I mind it isn't the ads -- it's that it's pure utter crap that is so terribly made that it actually manages to make the web a worse place purely for technological failings (i.e., not due to content) and its effect on my computers.
Re:I use that setup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think this should be read more like... (Score:3, Insightful)
Playing H.264 video via QuickTime on Mac OS X is less CPU intensive than Flash because Apple specifically optimizes their OS and hardware around QuickTime. Not surprisingly, they don't do the same for Flash.
It wasn't until a recent OS update that Mac OS X even offered APIs to allow other software access to hardware H.264 acceleration - but since Flash doesn't only support OS X 10.6.4, instead opting to support Mac OS X from Tiger on up, those APIs are entirely useless. And until Apple bothers supporting their users who haven't upgraded to the latest and most locked-down, will remain useless.
Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:No ABP in OSX? (Score:0, Insightful)
Troll does not mean "opinion you find disagreeable."
FF really does suck on the mac.
Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No ABP in OSX? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who would stand to benefit from such a study? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think this should be read more like... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's hard to detect when Javascript is stalling the browser and/or maxing out CPU, if it could be easily implemented, all the major browsers would already do it. The current 'this script is screwing with your PC' halts are unreliable at best, only catching a small percentage of javascript based lock ups. One of the most common lockups for me is when javascript gets stuck in a loop adding HTML elements to a page, especially given that Firefox is one of the worst browsers (in my experience) when it comes to handling insanely large HTML pages.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Just off the top of my head, I would imagine that browsers will be smart enough not to run HTML5 animations on pages that aren't visible to the user. That should help, right there.
I'd also imagine that with engineers at multiple companies fighting to make their browser the best, further refinements would be discovered and implemented. Adobe has had very little incentive to improve Flash since they are in a dominant position.
Re:Not just the Air (Score:3, Insightful)
So no, the architecture of Windows is not to blame at all here for iTunes, its all Apple all the way.
Re:I use that setup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not just the Air (Score:1, Insightful)
"just don't hold it like that!" lol
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a dozen times, I must be an Apple customer!
Advertising is the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.