Flash media is everywhere. Many ads have transitioned from static images or GIF animations to the more flashy (and sometimes that’s literal) Flash equivalent. It’s easy for me to tell on my Powerbook. I just look up at my menu bar for my CPU to be grinding at full capacity for nearly no reason. Flash is also going to be in our PDFs. Yes, I keep bringing that up because I think it’s ridiculous.
Anyway, that CPU sucking problem may finally be approached in a recent beta of Flash Player 10.
If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference.
I’m hoping all this Flash stuff I’ve seen lately uses a ton of device text. Otherwise, I’ll soon be returning to the days of tabless browsing as I close tabs in a desperate attempt to maintain response.
I'm with you on the whole Flash sucking up CPU utilization deal. Presumbaly Flash makes some content easier to develop -- not a developer so I'm just guessing. However, I'm really tired of my Windows laptop slowing to a crawl. If anything, I wish there were controls to selectively disable flash animation and / or flash video.
As an iPhone user, I'm in two minds about Flash. On the one hand, I miss the content on _some_ sites -- and I'm talking content, not all the silly ads. OTOH, I really don't want the sloppy, slow Flash experience replicated on my iPhone (3G or not).
I don't know about the other browsers, but Safari disables graphics drawing (or something like that - sound keeps playing) in background tabs . So when the fans on my MBP tries to take it airborne because Safari inexplicably starts pegging the CPU I just open an empty tab in all my Safari windows, and it usually quiets down.