Yesterday, Fast Company interviewed Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch, about earlier reports which revealed that a Macbook Air without Flash installed could save hours of battery life.
It seems as though after Steve Jobs denounced Flash, Adobe has been working hard to salvage and defend their name. With the introduction of Flash on Android phones and Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools, Adobe has been doing pretty well for itself. Despite their successes, Adobe has come under heavy criticism over the past week which has finally prompted a response.
Lynch claims, "It's a false argument to make, of the power usage. When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses."
Although Lynch has a point here, it looks like his solution to the battery problem would be turning your display off. He continued to state that several studies have confirmed Flash's higher battery life and argued that HTML5 was much less reliable. Unfortunately for all of the battery concerned flash users, Lynch didn't discuss any sort of solution to the problem shown with the Macbook Air.
Regardless of all the criticism and the success of HTML5, Lynch was optimistic about Adobe's future. In response to a question about HTML5's success being good or bad news, Lynch stated, "No, that's good news for Adobe, We support HTML. We're making tools for HTML5. It's a great opportunity for us. Flash and HTML have co-existed, and they're going to continue to to co-exist."
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AMW1011 Although Lynch has a point here, it looks like his solution to the battery problem would be turning your display off. He continued to state that several studies have confirmed Flash's higher battery life and argued that HTML5 was much less reliable. Unfortunately for all of the battery concerned flash users, Lynch didn't discuss any sort of solution to the problem shown with the Macbook Air.
Solution: Don't buy a Macbook Air. -
bdcrlsn I wonder that if Macromedia hadn't been bought out by Adobe, if Apple would still feel the same about Flash.Reply -
buddhav1 This just in, no matter how spiffy your LED backlit display is, it'll still consume power.Reply -
nforce4max Any thing that is a cpu hog on a mobile or laptop is going to be a battery sucker too not just flash -.-Reply -
freename He has a point.. The problem isn't really flash. The problem is that it's everywhere, with little ads displaying when you don't want them to and draining your battery life.Reply
I wonder if Adobe could release a mobile version of flash that doesn't actually run up a flash object until the user approves it. -
drapple freenameHe has a point.. The problem isn't really flash. The problem is that it's everywhere, with little ads displaying when you don't want them to and draining your battery life.I wonder if Adobe could release a mobile version of flash that doesn't actually run up a flash object until the user approves it.Use Flashblock plugin for Firefox. Just because advertisers abuse flash doesn't meean flash is bad. I only allow flash on websites that I give OK to run flash. Once HTML5 is established advertisers will abuse HTML5 and it may not be as easy to block as Flash is.Reply
Apple's real beef with Flash is that it directly competes with their App store business and they don't want the competition oh and flash practically killing QuickTime is probably another sore point. -
matt87_50 yeah, a macbook air without an operating system installed could save hours of battery life too...Reply
(probably more useful for me too, me and OSX just don't work...) -
matt87_50 freenameHe has a point.. The problem isn't really flash. The problem is that it's everywhere, with little ads displaying when you don't want them to and draining your battery life.I wonder if Adobe could release a mobile version of flash that doesn't actually run up a flash object until the user approves it.Reply
good idea. advertisers might not like that though (less advert rev, less free content on the web).
I think a better solution would be 'flash lite', give people an intensive to use it if they can (perhaps by implementing your above idea, but not for 'flash lite' content) then just make 'flash lite' stripped of all things advertisers don't need, that causes the bloat.