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

&#60;sarcasm&#62;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!&#60;/sarcasm&#62;<p>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.

No surprises there. Flash on a Mac is a sick joke.<p>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.<p>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.

I'm not sure this is particularly significant...as you could say the same thing about many tasks.<p>Not running video encoding on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.<p>Not running 3D games on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.<p>Not watching 1080p movies on your Macbook Air boosts battery life by 2 hours.

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

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.

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.

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