Dropping Adobe Flash boosts Apple's MacBook Air battery life by 2 hours

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/04/dropping_adobe_flash_boosts_apples_macbook_air_battery_life_by_2_hours.html

by sandipc • 16 years ago

73 70 16 years ago

appleinsider.com

beej71• 16 years ago

Soon you'll be able to get the same battery life drops just by having JavaScript turned on, as more advertisers move to HTML5.

ceejayoz3• 16 years ago

Flash tends to be a bear on Macs - even some basic YouTubing makes my 8-core Mac Pro with 10 GB RAM turn all its fans on.

JavaScript, on the other hand, has seen a huge emphasis on performance, with Google's work on V8 and the stuff Apple has been doing with Webkit. I strongly suspect it'll be better performance than Flash.

riobard• 16 years ago

until ads turn to JS+Canvas+whatever to ruin the whole thing again.

ergo982• 16 years ago

I strongly suspect it'll be better performance than Flash.

There is absolutely no empirical basis for assuming this. In actual comparisons between the two -- at least the tests that I've seen -- Flash take the lead.

Removing Flash and being saved the overhead of endless and overbearing ads is good, but as has been said the advertisers will move to HTML5 (they already are), and they're going to do the same full motion video, moving dynamic multimedia, etc, that causes Flash to be such a beast. Worse, it won't be as easily segregatable because to the browser it will be no different than the rest of the web application.

seanalltogether2• 16 years ago

Flash actionscript runs faster then javascript in pretty much any benchmark, javascript can only go so far before object typing is required to gain parity with other language. As for video, you're trading cpu power for gpu power when running flash vs quicktime, but I'm not sure the gpu will be any less of a drain on battery.

frou_dh2• 16 years ago

Am I somehow immune from Flash on Mac being a complete hog? Sure, it uses a decent chunk of CPU, but I rarely if ever get my CPU pegged and fans ramped up as everyone seems to claim.

GHFigs• 16 years ago

A crucial difference is that browser vendors can actually do something about JavaScript performance.

stevenwei• 16 years ago

I'm not sure this is particularly significant...as you could say the same thing about many tasks.

Not running video encoding on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

Not running 3D games on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

Not watching 1080p movies on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

evo_92• 16 years ago

Adblock and/or ClickToFlash also would do the trick.

protomyth2• 16 years ago

To a point, but some sites actually serve up different content if your browser can't do Flash.

msbarnett4• 16 years ago

I'm not sure that "browsing the internet and being shown advertisements on web pages" should be considered a task whose intensiveness is on-par with 3D rendering, 1080p decoding, or encoding.

Or rather, I think it isn't a flattering comment on Flash's efficiency that having it display ads on webpages requires that much processing power.

pavlov• 16 years ago

I don't understand why people think Flash itself is somehow responsible for content that is CPU-intensive (as evidenced by the number of upvotes on your comment).

Flash is a Turing-complete runtime that executes 3rd party content, and the environment that hosts Flash doesn't place any restrictions on how much resources it can use. With such liberties, it's completely expected that some people will produce banner ads that consume 99% of CPU time.

CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem, so getting rid of Flash wouldn't solve anything. (You may think it does because you're running a Flash blocker, but that's just because the offending content producers haven't migrated to your preferred solution yet.)

abstractbill4• 16 years ago

...it isn't a flattering comment on Flash's efficiency that having it display ads on webpages requires that much processing power.

Amusing of course, but not even close to being accurate. Take a look at this for example:

http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/alchemyPushingPixels/

That's rendering about 300,000 particles in 3D, in realtime. On my four-year-old macbook pro, the cpu usage is barely noticeable.

ergo982• 16 years ago

I'm not sure that "browsing the internet and being shown advertisements on web pages" should be considered a task whose intensiveness is on-par with 3D rendering, 1080p decoding, or encoding.

Browsing the modern web is an incredibly complex activity.

Many of those Flash ads feature high bitrate videos, sound streams, and complex interactive elements. Of course, maybe advertisers shouldn't be building such overbearing creations to try to grab your attention, but don't blame Flash for their excess.

elblanco3• 16 years ago

Depends what's on the advertisement.

There's nothing that prevents somebody from writing ads in javascript/canvas and using your browser to fold proteins.

abstractbill4• 16 years ago

I've done a lot of Flash hacking while at justin.tv and I have to say, while it has its bugs, the Flash virtual machine is an under-appreciated piece of technology. It can be incredibly fast, in the right hands.

I believe the people calling for its demise are actually calling for an end to sloppy programming by bad coders who work for ad agencies. If Flash ever actually dies, and gets replaced by "HTML5", people are going to be sorely disappointed when those very same bad coders simply start writing exactly the same sloppy code in javascript.

msbarnett4• 16 years ago

To a certain extent, I agree; sloppily written Flash software is a huge part of the problem.

But Adobe isn't doing itself any favours either. Once every day or two the fans on my laptop ramp up for apparently no reason -- and a quick trip into the process monitor invariably reveals that the Flash plugin process has gone rampant and is eating 100% of my CPU, long after I've left the site that was using it. It's excruciating to wait for Adobe to fix these long-standing issues, as they seem to feel no real urgency to improve the performance and stability of the plugin.

"HTML5" as a group of technologies to replace Flash will no doubt see its share of terribly written uses, but at least the Firefox, Chrome, Safari et al teams can compete to write the most-efficient, least buggy runtimes for those crappy sites to run on.

xuhu• 16 years ago

Here's a comparison of playing 720p video using Flash versus Mplayer: http://imgur.com/fq5c1

Mplayer is roughly twice as fast, and both are using libavcodec for decoding H264.

loewenskind• 16 years ago

I just want Flash to go away because I find it silly that such a huge portion of the web experience is provided by one company instead of a standard like the rest of it.

rm-rf• 16 years ago

Running NoScript and only enabling javascript and flash when needed likely has a similar effect. The advantage, of course is that with Flash installed but disabled, you can enable/disable it as desired and as battery permits.

geuis• 16 years ago

You know, what you say brings to mind an interesting point. Right now most people ~98% I think, have javascript enabled all the time. Its a smaller minority of us that use NoScript.

There are no mechanisms that I know of in popular browsers to disable certain html5 features like canvas, video, or audio elements.

So while its possible right now to disable Flash by not installing it or using certain browser extensions, if an ad provider loads an ad that uses the video or audio element you really have no way to disable them. Disabling javascript should prevent canvas-based ads from running, but what's to stop video and audio playing if your browser supports autoplay?

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

No doubt extensions will be created (or more likely, support will be added to the existing Flash- and/or ad-blocking extensions) if this becomes a significant problem.

rickmb• 16 years ago

No surprises there. Flash on a Mac is a sick joke.

People who think Apple is just looking for excuses against Flash have never used a Mac. The only time the fans kick in on any of Macs I've owned in the past decade is when Flash is running. The only time any browser crashes it's because of Flash. Flash eats memory, CPU and anything else it can lay it's hands (okay, it leaves the disk alone) on until your Mac becomes either unusable or it has drained the battery.

Flash is the closest thing to malware on a Mac. Anybody who thinks it would have even been possible to have a usable version of Flash on an iPhone or iPad grossly underestimates the incompetence of Adobe.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

<sarcasm>Even more significantly, it was found that not turning on the MacBook Air increased its battery life by 36 hours! Using this amazing data we are able to infer that not using your computer saves battery life. The less you use it, the more you save!</sarcasm>

This is more an argument for tools like Flashblock to be built into browsers (like they are on Android) than it is an argument against Flash itself. You can argue that Flash its inefficient but it's just as true that the tasks Flash is used to do are intrinsically complex and power consuming.

cma• 16 years ago

"it's just as true that the tasks Flash is used to do are intrinsically complex and power consuming"

Spinning, blinking, scaled moving sprite advertisements. I don't think those are intrinsically power consuming; the GPU on most phones/laptops could handle them (blind guess) 50x more power-efficiently than flash.

widgetycrank• 16 years ago

Isn't Flash 10.1 GPU-accelerated? Maybe that was just for videos. Though I recall the Mac version using one of the Core libraries for vector graphics.

wtallis2• 16 years ago

You should be careful how you use the term "flashblock". For desktop web browsers, most "flashblock" tools only hide the flash objects. They do this to not break compatibility as thoroughly, but it unfortunately means that browsers running flashblock are still generally 100% compatible with flash-based security exploits. It seems reasonable to expect that such tools can hardly improve the battery life over unrestricted Flash.

I don't know if this applies to Android, but on a MacBook Air, you're best off using Adblock and/or NoScript to ensure that flash objects and advertising scripts never even get fetched over the network.

sprout2• 16 years ago

>It seems reasonable to expect that such tools can hardly improve the battery life over unrestricted Flash.

If you mean to say what you're saying, that Flashblock doesn't make a significant change from unrestricted Flash, you're dead wrong. Wireless transfer is a notable driver of power consumption, but generally it being on is the main driver, not use. CPU on the other hand draws much more under load, and Flash will put it under a lot of load.

Tyrannosaurs• 16 years ago

What you say about Flashblock being installed and active as standard is true (as is the model Chrome uses where when the browser closes it automatically closes Flash - not true for Safari and Firefox) but I think the point that the test is trying to make is that this is a drain on battery life for no benefit to the user.

This wasn't a case of the user doing a load of value add things using Flash which would be fine, it was basically adverts which the user cares about not one jot draining the battery.

It's easy in the midst of the current Apple / Adobe spat to see anything involving Apple and Flash as petty bickering but I think the scale of the impact and the nature of the activity (that is nothing the user is really actively doing) make is a story / fact worth reporting.

swah• 16 years ago

Its just the Mac Flash implementation, no? Many tabs with Flash content don't make Windows slow IIRC.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

I suspect that many Flash apps have a loop running at a certain frequency, which can have about the same performance impact of polling. Compared to an event-driven architecture, a loop is always running, with each iteration consuming CPU even if there is no real work to do that iteration. I had a brief foray as a Flash programmer and noticed this pattern in some of the codebases I saw, and in what the Flash IDE seems to push. Not sure how widely spread it is, or done any measurements on impact, however. But it has the potential to contribute to the CPU sponging the Flash browser plugin is notorious for. Take this effect, multiple it by many little Flash apps per tab, many tabs, many windows, and it can add up.

kreek• 16 years ago

While it is true that some Flash apps have loop (games must have a loop) it's a bit ignorant to compare it to an event-driven architecture. Flash's ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript (as is JavaScript), is an event driven-architecture. Events are first class citizens of the framework and bubble up through the display list. Even the loop that gets abused by so many is firing off events.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

> While it is true that some Flash apps have loop (games must have a loop) it's a bit ignorant to compare it to an event-driven architecture.

not sure if you meant it, but that comes off as pretty rude.

loops and EDA's are different things, and there is value in comparing and considering them. also, the Flash API's may have first-class support for the notion of events, but that does not mean that every glorified loop involves events, or vice versa. in a pure EDA, no task is performed unless an event of interest occurs. mindless polling and housekeeping loops are one anti-pattern contributing to unnecessary CPU use.

also, while we're being pedantic, technically not all games require loops. I've built plenty myself that had no loops in the application code.

Dropping Adobe Flash boosts Apple's MacBook Air battery life by 2 hours

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