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Comment by velcro | Hacker News Reader

A colleague of mine was a very vocal anti-Flash proponent - he used to say that he's tired of his laptop overheating from those 5 stupid animated Flash banners (on his favourite news site).

The irony of it is - I'm not sure 5 animated WebGL banners would keep his laptop any cooler...

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Here is a pretty neat WebGL site where you can test that theory. http://david.li/flow/

Particle tests are a dime a dozen. You could have seen the same things in Flash 10 years ago.

BTW I'm on a Mac viewing your (66k polygons) example in Chrome - and my fans started spinning almost a few seconds after opening your link. Five of those running in parallel and my laptop would probably explode.

GPU seems to be going crazy - http://i.imgur.com/t4qC0LJ.png

It took less than 2 minutes for that page to put my workstation-class graphics card up over 10 degrees C with the fans at 100% and audible from the next room.

That's not a good sign.

getting the GPU to offload stuff and letting the host OS deal with it instead of layers of browser plugins still sounds better (even when Flash tries to use hardware acceleration).

for example, it's much more efficient to let the browser (Safari) play html5 video and hardware decode it than the same video through flash.

it's also much easier to control things when it's not in a black box such as flash, browsers let you disable or whitelist things like JS, WebGL, etc.

If you're implying that Flash is using only software-based rendering while WebGL is hardware accelerated - thats not really true. Look it up - Flash has been doing HW acc. for years now across platforms. Its 2015 now and it took WebGL 5 years to get to decent (but not perfect) desktop support - forget about mobile. Same with video - as far as I know Flash does HW acc. video too.

To a developer Flash is not a black box - to a user, again - it seems that that technology gets a lot of blame for what developers are doing with it. If you have 5 animated banners hogging your CPU/GPU, whether in WebGL or Flash - who is to blame?

I specifically mention that even when it tries to do hardware acceleration it isn't as efficient. I know it does h264 hardware acceleration along with 3D stuff. It does it, it just does it really poorly compared to native alternatives.

The blackbox comment is referring to it not being part of the DOM.

Efficiency is a really subjective benchmark. Especially when there are multiple browsers and platforms in play. Look at the WebGL example posted a few comments above - it will very efficiently warm up your GPU :)

Of course the content of a plugin is not a part of the DOM - however you're not calling MP4 videos or webfonts "blackboxes" for not being able to read their source code from the web inspector either...

> Efficiency is a really subjective benchmark

Playing SD quality video in HTML5 in Safari; minimal CPU usage, 7 hours battery life (on a 2012 MBA). Playing SD quality video in Flash in Safari; heavy CPU usage, audible fan noise, 2 hour battery life.

In a past life I did some Flash development; the Windows player was generally a little better (with the Mac one being in between and the Linux one being _horrendously_ inefficient), but it was still far from _good_.

it isn't, it's pretty easy to measure CPU usage along with energy usage with the exact same video file across multiple browsers on the same computer and across different players (html5 vs flash).

In which browser can I whitelist the usage of WebGL without turning of JavaScript completely? (which makes large parts of the web hard to use or totally unusable)

Whitelisted/Click-to-play flash works relatively well.

Safari:

http://f.cl.ly/items/2J3Y0W473c3y1N2s401k/Screen%20Shot%2020...

http://f.cl.ly/items/2X2X303p3q2i2a2d2M3o/Screen%20Shot%2020...

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