Lose Flash - get an extra hour of battery life

[darngooddesign]

I hate flash so much. I hope they go away forever in next 5 years. Html 5 for the win. Battery life goes down so much with flash video.

I know right, and if you never turn your computer on you get amazing battery life as well.

Flash was killing my battery on my new 13" Air. I deleted it, and it is way better!

You will get even better battery life if you never use the internet.


I've never understood all this outrage over Flash. If you do anything processor intensive on your computer it will reduce your battery life. Watching non-flash videos will consume your battery as well. Its the nature of the beast. If you are so concerned about battery life here are some other suggestions:

1. Avoid playing games.
2. Forget about Wi-fi as well, grab yourself the Ethernet dongle and stay tethered to the wall.
3. Don't play music or videos.

Yay...reading text documents at 1 bar of brightness is lots of fun.

 

[bamf]

I know right, and if you never turn your computer on you get amazing battery life as well.


You will get even better battery life if you never use the internet.


I've never understood all this outrage over Flash. If you do anything processor intensive on your computer it will reduce your battery life. Watching non-flash videos will consume your battery as well. Its the nature of the beast. If you are so concerned about battery life here are some other suggestions:

1. Avoid playing games.
2. Forget about Wi-fi as well, grab yourself the Ethernet dongle and stay tethered to the wall.
3. Don't play music or videos.

Yay...reading text documents at 1 bar of brightness is lots of fun.

I think the outrage over Flash can be summarized like this -

Given a video from YouTube that is available in both Flash and HTLM5 you will generally have the following experience:

1. If run in Flash you will use about 50% or more of your CPU with the Safari and Flash plugin processes.
2. If run in HTML5 you will use ~16% of your CPU with the Safari process.

That extra CPU time burns the battery faster - that's just a fact.

Don't believe me, see this video I found by simply typing "Flash vs. HTML5 CPU" on Google:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRUFJ9TKWA

Flash is poorly implemented in OS X. That's not Apple's fault - it's Adobe's. If they would spend the time to make Flash run better on OS X, then they probably would not have the CEO of the most successful technology company in the US (maybe the world) singling them out by name.

The ball is firmly in Adobe's court...

 

[darngooddesign]

I think the outrage over Flash can be summarized like this...

Exactly, so if you don't like it don't watch flash videos, but uninstalling the plugin means that the wealth of Flash sites don't work either. Simply installing Click2Flash means that you can still access those sites without automatically ramping up your CPU.

See...no need to uninstall Flash like some Luddite who is scared of that mean-old industrial revolution.

 

[bamf]

Exactly, so if you don't like it don't watch flash videos, but uninstalling the plugin means that the wealth of Flash sites don't work either. Simply installing Click2Flash means that you can still access those sites without automatically ramping up your CPU.

See...no need to uninstall Flash like some Luddite who is scared of that mean-old industrial revolution.

Which is why I've had click2flash for a long time myself.

There are some people that still want to say that it's any Internet video though, and that's simply not true. Heck, it's not true of Flash on Windows to nearly the extent it is on OS X.

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

\
Flash is poorly implemented in OS X. That's not Apple's fault - it's Adobe's. If they would spend the time to make Flash run better on OS X, then they probably would not have the CEO of the most successful technology company in the US (maybe the world) singling them out by name.

The ball is firmly in Adobe's court...

Does Flash currently support OSX hardware acceleration for h264 videos?

 

[bamf]

Does Flash currently support OSX hardware acceleration for h264 videos?

I'm sure you know that it does - but it's only available for Macs from 2008 forward (Nvidia 9400M and forward).

 

[darngooddesign]

Which is why I've had click2flash for a long time myself...

Yep, and I have Flash set to "On Demand" on my Droid X. Uninstalling it because of battery concerns strikes me as way too much of an alarmist Steve-Jobs-is-always-right kind of reaction. The fact remains that the internet still relies heavily of Flash and that's really not going to change any time soon; esp with Android gaining the mindshare that it is. HTML5 is not the web savior that people who know too little think it is.

 

[bamf]

Yep, and I have Flash set to "On Demand" on my Droid X. Uninstalling it because of battery concerns strikes me as way too much of an alarmist Steve-Jobs-is-always-right kind of reaction. The fact remains that the internet still relies heavily of Flash and that's really not going to change any time soon; esp with Android gaining the mindshare that it is. HTML5 is not the web savior that people who know too little think it is.

Time will tell on HTML5.

The thing that is great about click2flash though is that I don't have to have my battery thrashed by every website that thinks that Flash is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Seriously - how many advertisements do I need spinning or moving while trying to get my attention. That's why I love the Reader view in Safari now as well...

 

[stylinexpat]

I think the outrage over Flash can be summarized like this -

Given a video from YouTube that is available in both Flash and HTLM5 you will generally have the following experience:

1. If run in Flash you will use about 50% or more of your CPU with the Safari and Flash plugin processes.
2. If run in HTML5 you will use ~16% of your CPU with the Safari process.

That extra CPU time burns the battery faster - that's just a fact.

Don't believe me, see this video I found by simply typing "Flash vs. HTML5 CPU" on Google:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRUFJ9TKWA

Flash is poorly implemented in OS X. That's not Apple's fault - it's Adobe's. If they would spend the time to make Flash run better on OS X, then they probably would not have the CEO of the most successful technology company in the US (maybe the world) singling them out by name.

The ball is firmly in Adobe's court...

Still have not been able to figure out how to view HTML5 on my MBP.. When I go to Youtube to see a video I don't see any options for viewing.

 

[THE dAY]

Still have not been able to figure out how to view HTML5 on my MBP.. When I go to Youtube to see a video I don't see any options for viewing.

Try here for HTML5
http://www.youtube.com/html5

 

[Moyank24]

Time will tell on HTML5.

The thing that is great about click2flash though is that I don't have to have my battery thrashed by every website that thinks that Flash is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Seriously - how many advertisements do I need spinning or moving while trying to get my attention. That's why I love the Reader view in Safari now as well...

I couldn't agree more. I just found out about click2flash last week and there is a noticeable difference in how my Macbook is running. And not having to see those obnoxious ads on every website is a huge bonus.

 

[eyespii]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Still have not been able to figure out how to view HTML5 on my MBP.. When I go to Youtube to see a video I don't see any options for viewing.

Try here for HTML5
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Problem that I've noticed is that some of the videos won't play in html5 through the YouTube opt-in, but those same videos play fine in safari using the html5 extension.

I really prefer chrome over safari though and have installed adblock plus, but still lots of videos on YouTube are running in flash when I'm using chrome.

 

[gw1]

I know right, and if you never turn your computer on you get amazing battery life as well.


You will get even better battery life if you never use the internet.

Surely the issue is how well your computer does the things you want it to, including how much power those things take from your (limited) battery capacity.

If that doesn't include automatically showing all the Flash content other originators want you to watch, then its perfectly legitimate to block that until you decide you want to see it.