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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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