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Comment by Yaggo | Hacker News Reader

> Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 20 percent in our testing.

Enough said. I've zillion of Safari windows running on multiple Spaces, and when on the road/rail with MacBook, I always disable the Flash plugin altogether. Despite my use of click2flash, HTML5-enabled video on YouTube & Vimeo, I still see "idling" Flash-plugin process continuously taking few percents of CPU, no matter what.

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I wonder if these are "invisible" Flash apps. I've heard that Click2Flash lets through something like any 1x1 Flash apps because those are almost always just used for Flash cookies and the like. Would be disappointing (though not shocking!) to hear that some of them are poorly written and use CPU even when idle.

If Apple's Click2Flash is really letting 1x1 apps through, that kind of kill Safari as a reasonable Firefox alternative in my book.

Click2Flash is a 3rd party extension. I just realized the "allow small Flash objects" thing is in the preferences:

[ ] Allow Flash if size is at most _______

On my machine which hasn't been changed from defaults, it says "1x1" but is not checked. So, unless Yaggo has changed their settings, my hypothesis of why they're still seeing Flash is incorrect.

Weird. I'm using version 1.6b9 which claims to be most recent but it does not have such an option.

I'm on 1.8. It's now a Safari extension - if you're running Safari 5 you can go to the Safari menu then click Safari Extensions Gallery, it's on there. The Click2Flash project page doesn't do a good job of pointing this out!

It seems like replacing the ads with poorly coded Javascript/HTML5 versions will do the same. The only reason the Air benefits at the moment is because everyone else has Flash installed.

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