Since the review of Apple’s Macbook Air by ArsTechnica a lot of people have expressed support for the notion that installing Flash directly reduces the duration of its battery. Here’s the relevant part:
We did find (quite by accident) that Apple may have more reasons behind not installing Flash by default other than the stated reason of ensuring that users always have the most up-to-date version. Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02—with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.
A lot of comments like Josh MacDonald’s, “this [is] a devastating proof of Steve Jobs claims about Flash” or “Two hours of battery life, just by keeping Flash Player uninstalled” directly blame flash being installed for the reduction of battery life. No one seems to bother to direct the attention to what is displayed by flash. Consider reading the quote this way (emphasis mine):
ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary.
It comes down to user activity dictating battery life. In the ‘before’ test the user is running animated ads, in the ‘after’ he’s not. Battery life is dependant on what kind of content the user is viewing. (And calling the ads ‘content’ is stretching it, a lot. Let‘s call it uncontent, or scumtent, from now on). Unfortunately the user has not much choice on what kinds of ads are being shown to him. That’s what should be talked about, not what underlying technology is being used to show them. A lot of the advertisements lately are based on importuning and badgering the person who ends up watching the ads, and wasting their resources such as processor and memory capacity and network bandwidth.
What happens when advertisers get savvy and start using html5 and canvas and css3 and whatever new fun technologies come to replace flash? Sure, we should be asking from Adobe to add controls to Flash so we as users can control what url’s we don’t want to open, how long animations should run, etc. But we should also be asking that from browser developers.
Flash should be pointed at for wasting battery, not because of its mere existence, but because it indiscriminately downloads and plays content that the user can’t avoid or opt out of. Let’s talk about how Flash should empower the user, and how browsers and other kinds of ‘user agents’ should too.
We the users need to be able to configure a time-out after which the animated ad or whatever stops animating and, thus, wasting cpu cycles and power/battery. We the users need to be able to configure a maximum size that this scumtent can occupy on our screen. We the users need a way to remove stuff from a webpage I don’t want there, call it click2unflash (or click2unimage, or click2unmusic). We the users need an easy way to blacklist websites that won’t be loaded, via flash or another plugin or html5 or whatnot.
Let’s start getting ready for that bridge, and not reach it unprepared and then just pay whatever the guy in the toll booth wants to let us cross it.
