The MacBook Air's battery life is reduced by whopping two hours when Adobe Flash is installed, according to testing by ArsTechnica.
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 20 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.
So if those added minutes of battery life are important to you, consider disabling or uninstalling Flash, especially on your new MacBook Air.
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Comments (3)
Comments are closed for this article.
0
lyesmith - November 5, 2010 at 6:53am
Thats great. The problem is that in the moment when badly written flash adds will be replaced by badly written HTML5 adds the battery life will go down flash or no flash. Try to do any animation on HTML5 canvas, it uses more CPU and battery life that the same animation in flash.
0
Noman - November 4, 2010 at 2:29am
Let me guess what also affects, if you play 3d games it probably reduces battery life up to 80%...:)
0
Benjamin - November 4, 2010 at 1:56am
Thats when you just install flash blocker extension sin chrome or firefox. Letting you choose which flash objects to run and when to run them.
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