Flash haters, wake up (HTML5 ads demo)

And they won't be rotating cube demos - no, the designers will instance an entire 3D engine, and they'll start dumping in expensive shaders and high-poly models that "work for them" on a high-end desktop. And then web sites load three or four of these ads. No optimization or acceleration is going to tame such monstrosities. Your netbook might hang just trying to load the page, forcing you to use an ad blocker whether or not you want one.

The long-term solution is for ad networks to minimize client-side tricks and stick to safer performance envelopes(images or video).

Flash player is also single threaded so executes code on a single cpu core, but it does rendering using multiple cores. If you are seeing a single core spike to 100% usage then it is a sign of badly coded actionscript (onFrameEnter event handlers are very popular with designers who cut and paste as2 code), if you are seeing multiple cores at around 100% then it is a rendering issue, i.e. trying to redraw the entire stage every frame and/or a very high frame rate (> 30 fps).

I'm not sure if code attached to the frame in the Flash IDE would also cause multiple cores to spike, or if this also executes in the single threaded cycle. But again, having actionscript inside the .fla instead of separate .as files is a sign of a poorly designed/developed flash application.

1) Flash is awful

2) Flash is the _only_ contributor to power drain so lets vilify it, and let's ignore HTML5 ads for now. (this was DaringFireball's implication)

The article does a wonderful job of demonstrating a very near future where John Gruber's Macbook will have 2 hours of battery life thanks to spinning gerbil HTML5 ads.

Again, I'm all for disabling Flash, but DF's constant championing of HTML5 as a panacea for all of Flash's forthcomings needs to be stopped (it's becoming a religion).

If anything, this article encourages a more constructive discussion than the trolling DF does.

I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.

The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.

Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.