Dropping Adobe Flash Boosts Battery Life

[gato]

Seems to offer good support for getting away from Adobe Flash on mobile devices.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10 ... hours.html
According to testing performed by Chris Foresman of Ars Technica, the new MacBook Air can last for a full six hours after loading a series of webpages in Safari, but its battery performance drops down to four hours once Adobe Flash is installed and the same sites are loaded.

"Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary," Foresman wrote. Without the Flash plugin installed, websites typically display static ads in place of Flash content, erasing the need for constant processing power demanded by the Flash plugin's rendering engine.

With Flash ads consuming as much as 33 percent of the MacBook Air's battery potential, it's no wonder why Apple has demonstrated no interest in getting a version of Flash installed on its iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, all of which have much smaller batteries.

 

[radioman]

That is interesting. Was not thinking along the lines of advertisements as a large problem, but in hindsight seems logical. I will be paying more attention to this next time I am running my Macbook in a portable setting. I figure a popup blocker or some sort of flash-stopping add-on will solve this problem under those situations.

 

[westmeadboy]

On Android, most (I guess) people use Flash "on demand" so it's not actually using up any battery power until you explicitly choose to play some video or whatever. I'm definitely glad I have the option.

 

[gato]

I will be paying more attention to this next time I am running my Macbook in a portable setting. I figure a popup blocker or some sort of flash-stopping add-on will solve this problem under those situations.

I don't have a Mac, but I read that Clicktoflash is good on the Mac for turning off Flash until you need it.
http://clicktoflash.com/

 

[radioman]

thanks gato... i'll check it out.

 

[John]

As well as click2flash, I also run:

http://www.bashflash.com/

Flash for Mac is inefficient (Adobe's fault) - whenever it runs, it ramps up the CPU and the fans on my MBP spin up. I therefore use click2flash and bashflash even if connected to mains power.

 

[radioman]

Do they do the same thing? Which one works better? (if any...?)

 

[John]

They do different things:

click2flash replaces flash content with a box which you can click on to activate the Flash

bashflash stops any flash which is already running

 

[character]

http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash ... gle_chrome