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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people think Flash itself is somehow responsible for content that is CPU-intensive (as evidenced by the number of upvotes on your comment).

Flash is a Turing-complete runtime that executes 3rd party content, and the environment that hosts Flash doesn't place any restrictions on how much resources it can use. With such liberties, it's completely expected that some people will produce banner ads that consume 99% of CPU time.

CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem, so getting rid of Flash wouldn't solve anything. (You may think it does because you're running a Flash blocker, but that's just because the offending content producers haven't migrated to your preferred solution yet.)

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"CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem"

I don't have anything but anecdotal data to back this up, which is a huge caveat. Please feel free to knock this down.

But I have to ask: have we seen as much improvement in Flash performance as we have in plain old browser performance? Browsers are improving by leaps and bounds. I'm skeptical that Flash has had a similar performance renaissance.

For one thing, who've they had to compete with until recently? Browser vendors are tripping over one another to improve speed. Until HTML5, you were out of luck for rich content if you didn't want to use Flash.

Now, I agree that eliminating Flash won't solve ads in one stroke of JS. Even so, moving that stuff out of Flash (which browser vendors have little control over) into the browser itself enables vendors to improve whatever performance-troubled cases that HTML5 ads provide.

And, most importantly, improving HTML5 performance, ads or no, is a win across the board, IMO. A faster browser means faster ads AND apps.

Webit is starting to provide rendering and animation that is more native and more efficient.

Simple fact is, Flash is not as good as we need it to be.

It seems that if you own a Mac and like Flash you "need to be converted" in the same way a dogmatic religious person sells you a life of enlightenment.

If you don't like Flash, fine. Just stop selling this fallacy that Flash has some universal special power to drain battery power, or has some special ability to empower the worst ads. It's patently absurd.

Apparently you don't use a Macbook with Flash enabled. The difference is significance. You don't even have to open Activity monitor to see it – you hear it.

This didn't fix that? http://www.osnews.com/story/23672/Adobe_Releases_Flash_for_M...

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