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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

<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.

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"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.

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.

I think only Windows gets the GPU acceleration, so far.

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.

>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.

What I'm saying is that if Flashblock can't stop a script in a "blocked" flash object from installing a trojan, then clearly Flashblock isn't effective at preventing flash objects from getting CPU time.

From personal experience watching my CPU usage, you're dead wrong.

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.

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