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Comment by pieter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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