Adobe Testing Optimized Version of Flash for MacBook Air

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Posted November 17, 2010 at 8:46pm by iClarified

Adobe's Shantanu Narayen says the company is testing an optimized version of Flash for the MacBook Air, according to Engadget.

Recent reports found that removing Flash from the MacBook Air can increase battery life by up to 2 hours.

We asked the CEO what the greater battery life sans flash in Apple's new laptop meant for the platform (vis-a-vis HTML5) just a few minutes ago. He said it's really all about optimizing for silicon: "When we have access to hardware acceleration, we've proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform." You wouldn't be blamed for thinking that sentence a cop-out, but that's actually not the case -- the chief executive says they've presently got a Macbook Air in the labs and have an optimized beta of Flash for the device in testing even as we speak.

Adobe Testing Optimized Version of Flash for MacBook Air

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Phil - November 19, 2010 at 3:27am

Why is this so hard for everyone to understand. There are a few issues that are quite seperate that people keep confusing. I shall attempt to explain this: 1/ The Macbook Air is VERY good at lowering the CPU voltage to increase the battery life. If the CPU is close to idle you can easily get 8 hours of battery life. However if the CPU is working at about 30% this drops to about 4 hours, and down to about 2 hours when working at close to 100%. 2/ Playing H264 vidoes in Quicktime on the Air is very efficient. DVD quality video plays using less than 20% CPU, so you can watch 4 hours of video on one charge. 3/ Playing video using a flash, VLC, Divx, etc, uses more CPU and hence lowers the battery life. e.g. Watching a flash/MKV/AVI etc video of DVD quality uses closer to 30% CPU and reduces the battery life to about 3 hours. 4/ Clearly the usage and hence battery life depends on a lot of other factors such as the brighness of the back light, the resolution of the video, complexity of decoding the video, etc. 5/ Now the big one, if you have a web browser open and there is flash on the web page, flash will use quite a bit of CPU to plan the flash. In my testing this brings my web surfing time down a lot depending on how many flash objects are on the pages I have open. Usually this is just an ad that you don't want to see anyway. It really stinks that just having this web page open will halve your battery life. This is the case even if the browser window is hidden or minimized since the flash object keeps using CPU even when minimized or hidden. 6/ Even if they use the GPU to decrese the CPU load to play flash, the problem will still exist if they keep playing the flash ad in the backgroud or when hidden. Optomizing the CPU usage will help a little, but doesn't address the root cause that flash is playing on all these websites to show us ads and we don't actually want the flash to play at all. 7/ The best solution to this currently is to install flash block extension in Firefox. Then you can choose what Flash objects you want to play. Goodbye to all flash ads and hello long battery life. Hope this helps explain the issue a bit. The issue of how much CPU flash eats hasn't really come up much before since the battery runtime on the Air varies much more than any other laptop depending on CPU load. Most laptops the biggest difference is the backlight, but not so with the Air.

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poulet - November 17, 2010 at 8:52pm

why would you adapt your software to shitty hardware?

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MCF3778 - November 17, 2010 at 9:21pm

I second that comment!

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DigiHead - November 18, 2010 at 2:26pm

actually its other way around! finally adobe pays attention and trying to do something about. most of the security problems, performance problems, battery life problems comes from flash, so....

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