“Nothing heats a Mac up (or drains its battery) faster than power-hungry Flash content running on a web site. Apple’s finally giving Mac users the means to cut that off at the knees with a new technology in Mavericks called Safari Power Saver,” Peter Cohen reports for iMore.
“Even the more conscientious Mac user is bound to miss it once in a while when a web page laden with Flash content loads,” Cohen reports. “All of a sudden you’re watching your battery meter drop rapidly and you notice the MacBook is running really hot, and oh, that noise – the fans have gone into high gear trying to get heat away from the motherboard.”
Cohen reports, “Apple says it a Mac CPU running Safari Power Saver can use up to 35 percent less power than before.”
Read more in the full article here.
Why won’t flash die?
Flush Flash.
Speaking of flushing:
Now that this news is out I can attest to the fact that Safari 7.0 on Mavericks runs great. From my testing, the dire RAM hogging introduced in v6.x has ended. Flash CPU devouring is over.
My Flash test app is the ridiculous and fun ‘Rocket Toilet’ game, found at the link below. It not only runs great in Safari 7, but so does the rest of the Mac while I am playing. IOW: Happy Safari days will soon be here again. Good riddance to the Safari v6.x series, and crap Flash code no longer rulz.
http://www.phyfun.com/Games/6-4145-Rocket-Toilet.aspx
Flash, the most oxymoronic name for a product.
@MacFreek
I’m still laughing! Good one. 🙂
Excellent — but “Microsoft Works” was pretty oxymoronic as well. 🙂
Another good one! Thanks guys!
Another one is : “Apple is doomed”
Is this the end of Click to Flash?
It’s up to you. Flash still eats some RAM and CPU. Blocking it will speed your journey through the Interwebs.
There’s a Safari extension called ClickToFlash which does the same thing as the Firefox preference.
The best solution? Abandon Flash completely. Uninstall it. If you absolutely need it, open the site in Chrome.
That will also save you from the biweekly “Update Your Flash” OS pop-ups that make you think you’re running windows they’re so frequent and annoying.
Exactly what I do.
And for “Flash required” videos on major websites: Turn on Developer menu in Safari, and change user agent to one of the Safari iOS options. After reloading the page, 90% of the time it’ll serve up the HTML5 video just fine.
Also useful in the meantime: The Safari extension FlashToHTML5.
http://www.joris-vervuurt.com/page9/page9.php
Youtube’s HTML5 player is surprisingly well-featured… e.g. video resolution, playback speed, annotations.
This extension, as well as my preferred YouTube5 (which gives me options like loading video manually after checking user rating and comments) I’ll enable when Youtube tries forcing Flash for certain videos.
It’s funny that Flash was always supposed to be this light alternative to video and in the end it became just as heavy or heavier
In part because of feature creep–it merged with the animation features and programming codebase of Shockwave.
And then Adobe didn’t optimize it for Mac hardware.
““Nothing heats a Mac up (or drains its battery) faster than power-hungry Flash content running on a web site.”
You mean like all of the annoying moving ads surrounding the entire page on MDN?
Not on my iPad. On my Mac there’s a magic plug in called Click to Flash.
Mine too. And AdBlock, and Ghostery.
Those are animated GIFs. Still annoying.
Simple solution, critic2: Uninstall Flash.
The worst part is, those morons that program Flash controls into their website, making it impossible to interact with it without having Flash enabled. Argh! And they all argue that they can’t rebuild the website to eliminate it.
Amazing isn’t it?
They probably can’t because they have no talent at building websites. The site you described is not a website but rather a flash site not too dissimilar from a municipal garbage dump.
One of the worst catastrophes of Flash website programming ever perpetrated:
http://www.jimcarrey.com/
WARNING: Do not click the link above if you are not PREPARED for the HORROR of Flash.
Web providers already have their sites programmed for non-Flash devices. Instead of using Flash on your computer, go into Safari Preferences and under the Advanced tab, check off “show Develop menu in menu bar.” When you go to site that demands Flash, go to the Develop menu, then under User Agent, select iPad. Safari will then tell the server you’re running an iPad and the website will reload the content and delivery it as HTML 5 instead of Flash. Uninstall Flash!
This is only correct at websites that have deliberately prepared for users NOT being able to run Flash. If a website is ONLY written in Flash, you get no such luck. It’s Flash or nothing.
In the case of your Develop menu work around, it FAILs at Flash-only websites. This also means the FlashToHTML5 extension FAILs as well. You get nothing. However, if you deliberately click on the screen, then the horror of Flash loads. This is certainly the case at my least favorite Flash infested website http://www.jimcarrey.com/
The HORROR. The horror.
What does this say about Adobe ???
It tells me Adobe doesn’t pay enough attention to real users needs even when it knows about a major problem.
For over a dozen years, this issue has plagued laptops. Adobe is the one who should have fixed this long ago.
My guess: They inherited the code from Macromedia when they bought the company, the code was not adequately documented, Adobe had no idea how to optimize it, and once Steve Jobs pointed out that the code is crap, Adobe went all hissy fit about it and decided that was a motivation to ignore the Flash problem even further.
IOW: Adobe can be serious dickheads.
The Irony, no pithy comment MDN?
There are 5 flash ads on this site alone. That’s not counting all of the flash that pops up due to the hotlinked ads in the article itself.
Hypocritical or a sign of good changes to come on this website?
Not that I’m any marketing expert, but:
If an advertiser only provides you with Flash ads to place on your website, what are you supposed to do about it? A kind word in their ear that “FLASH SUCKS!” can only go so far in motivating them to catch up with modern web coding. *Sigh*
Happiness: Seeing as iOS runs no Flash ever, and the fact that Adobe has stopped writing new Flash versions for Android, and the fact that mobile pads/tablets are swiftly becoming the dominating method of surfing the net… An advertiser is damned stupid to ONLY offer ads in Flash format. They’re literally BLOCKING OUT web users from seeing their ads. That’s NOT GOOD.
Is Flash still here?! Why won’t it go away! Why! Why! Why!