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Comment by veemjeem | Hacker News Reader

Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform.

Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...

Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on within 5 minutes -- it's horrible.

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Wow, it only uses 30% cpu? On my Q8400 in Ubuntu, it pegs an entire core the moment flash launches...

Playing a flash video almost brings my Core Duo macbook to its knees and uses around 40% of each of my 4 cores on my hackintosh (Q9450).

Let's add insult to injury: Apple has reported that a majority of crashes on a Mac — across the board — are due to Flash.

Flash is the single major reason Apple spun off plugins as separate processes, just so Flash's poor performance wouldn't make Safari crash so much.

If that's true, why doesn't Apple make their own swf viewer? I mean, they're Apple, they have twenty billion dollars in the bank; they can afford to reimplement Flash Player.

They are making their own "swf viewer". It's called HTML5 and it's the reason you can't find any Flash on their own webpage, or on their iPhones.

My macbook goes absolutely nuts when I watch even a 2 minute flash video -- CPU usage spikes to close to 100% as the fans try to compensate by ramping up to a speed that makes watching the presentation without headphones unbearable. Adobe definitely has a lot of work to do on Flash on OSX :(

I saw sometime ago a video that a guy opened up a flash video on the os x and then the same on a virtual machine, running windows, on top of os x. The cpu use on the latter was negligible.

I don't know what you have running on your Macbook, but I have two Macbooks, one new and one about 2 years old, and my kids watch hours of Flash videos and Flash games until I have to wrestle the computer out of their hands because it is bedtime.

This "30 minute battery life" smells fishy. It is a friend of friend of a friend who woke up one day in his hotel room with his kidney removed and his iPhone battery drained.

I loaded up this classic video in Safari:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsSHlCDIzNg&feature=relat...

and watched the resource use. While the video was playing, the minimum CPU use from Safari was 48%, with frequent spikes above 60%. As soon as I closed the tab, CPU use dropped to about 2% and stayed there. On a laptop with a full charge and power-management profiles to optimize usage you can get away with this; on a power-constrained mobile device you most certainly can't.

Same experience here, although I wouldn't laud flash's performance on Windows either. Silverlight runs better than flash most of the time, and Silverlight is pretty terrible.

Silverlight is pretty terrible

Compared to what? Silverlight uses a bit more CPU time when playing MP4 videos compared to Media Player or VLC but about the same as Google Chrome. It may be different on OS X. How does Silverlight's video performance on OS X compare to native Quicktime for example (which is relatively slow on Windows)?

Performance is much improved on Linux these days (at least the x64 version).

My Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 9.10 uses about 5-10% CPU at most for flash video, and usually a little less for flash-only sites. The only problem is that when it crashes the browser is sans-flash until you restart it.

Of course, playing the same flv file full-screen in mplayer uses almost no CPU at all.

On my machine, it likes to kill my whole webbrowser whenever I use the Youtube quicklist too many times. Then I can't relaunch the browser because it doesn't actually kill the browser cleanly; it's zombied. A few kill-9s later, and I can finally watch a cat flushing a toilet.

Not optimal.

Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...

Do you believe that this opinion both motivates and justifies Apple's refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone?

Well since the iPhone platform is similar to Apple's desktop platform, if I were Apple, before I went ahead and made concessions to Adobe I'd want to see some proof that they wouldn't mess up the user experience. So far Adobe has shown they aren't either willing or able to write quality Unix flash players.

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