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Comment by nzmsv | Hacker News Reader

"These crashes you are seeing do not exist. The 100% CPU usage is likewise an illusion. Also, Google is evil. Believe me!"

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FWIW, Flash in Firefox on Win32 has never ever crashed for me. In terms of CPU usage, that was relevant to me perhaps 5 years ago, but now a single core at 100% doesn't break 12.5% system usage - but I seldom see that much CPU usage from Flash except in things like games, where a game loop (=> 100% single CPU) would be expected anyway even if it wasn't Flash.

On the other hand, I'm no apologist for Flash. I wish it would go away just as much as the next guy. My only worry is that annoying advertisements that I can currently block trivially using FlashBlock may later be implemented using JS, SVG, canvas, etc., and thereby become much much harder to block reliably.

Yes, on Windows Flash performance is quite acceptable. Try living with it on OS X for a few weeks.

I think that part of the problem is that the Netscape plugin API only allows the plugin to draw when the browser explicitly allows it to. This is also the case on Windows, but for some reason it's much slower on the Mac.

Switching to Core Animation drawing (as in Flash Player 10.1) allows the plugin to draw directly to a backing store in video memory without having to wait for the browser. The plugin still has to request that the view be updated, but it's much faster as it can be done mostly on the GPU.

I'm not an expert on plugins or graphics, but that is how I understand it.

Can you link me to a site that currently thrashes your machine as a result of Flash on the page? I use a white MacBook (i.e. not exactly a monster of a machine) and my biggest headaches come from leaving Firefox open too long (which is why I've switched to Chrome).

I don't have a link on me now, and I'm at work on a windows machine so I can't go fine one. I have a couple year old white macbook and while I've never had a crash from Flash (Or maybe I did and thought it was something else) running flash video pretty much stops the computer from being able to do anything else and proc usage goes to about 85 - 90%. Try running two things in flash at the same time and I might as well not have a computer at all.

Youtube heavy-users aside, Flash's crashes are somewhat rare, but significantly more than any other plugin I've used. I've had about as many crashes on my Windows boxes as on my OSX. Speed-wise, though, it's definitely faster on Windows for no reason I can come up with except laziness / intentionally ignoring everything but Windows.

Could it be that some crashes are the fault poor programming and not the Flash Player itself?

I can eat up 100% of your CPU with Python.

Actionscript in the right hands can perform very well. A big part of the problem lies with the barrier to entry (low) and the features available to developers and designers via its API and tool-set.

Things like bitmap manipulation and real-time filters (drop-shadow, glow etc), they are really easy to implement and designers love the effects that can be achieved and tend to design with them in mind (can't blame them really), but without optimization care and skill it will eat a CPU alive.

These effects can also be implemented without a single line of code, a lot of the time it is not even the developers at fault.

I worked agency level for a number of years before I lost the will to live and gave it up, I seen this kind of thing daily and the culture of getting it out there didn't help either, unless there was a really switched on PM or lead developer in charge who understood this optimization time was generally second class.

EDIT: it did not help that OSX was a second class citizen and Flash took a 15% hit in Firefox (windows) either.

Flash video performanc is awful on OS X and Linux. That is entirely Adobe's fault.

An Intel Core2 Duo Mac Mini, with no graphics card to speak of (so this couldn't skew the results even theoretically) plays 720p H.264 YouTube-encoded videos with ~9% CPU usage, and no hiccups, the frame-rate is evenly distributed, every frame lasts for whatever time it should. Compare and contrast with the Flash decoder, that ceilings at about 70%, and plays un-evenly, even on a frame-by-frame level -- there is no way of telling how much time a given frame is showing on the screen.

That's why many will use Rentzsch' Click-to-Flash WebKit plug-in, to block all Flash permanently and play H.264 movies natively. github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash

Here's another one, this time from Firefox for Maemo RC3:

> We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.

Sounds like didn't read the linked info either.

For Maemo, see earlier on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090855

…but my web browser doesn't run python.

I can eat up 100% of your CPU with JavaScript.

Sounds like you didn't read the comment before commenting yourself, then...?

(Noise & disinfo levels seem at all-time highs recently... Engadget may merely be the first site of many to adapt.)

"Works on my machine!"

FTA: Before we release a new version of Flash Player we run more than 100,000 test cases and have built an automated system that has scanned over 1 million SWFs that we use for testing from across the web. Our QA lab has a very large variety of machines to represent the machines in real use on the web.

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