I regularly Flush my Mac and use the Flash Square 64 bit driver. It does make a huge difference on my Mac Pro.
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Adobe's Flash Player 10.2 to Offer Up to Ten-Fold Improvement in CPU Efficiency
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Because I don't have a 9600M GT or 320/330M video card, I don't have any hardware acceleration.
Adobe's demo video http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/stagevideo.html is still using ~70% CPU in flash and 15% CPU in Safari.
GPU usage is 17-20% as monitored with Hardware Monitor 4.9:
Flush.app seems nice, but the firefox plugin BetterPrivacy does this automatically without user intervention.
Unfortunately, the new Flash beta(10.2/10.3) doesn't work properly with Firefox 4 beta.(b8 currently):
Flash Square being 64bit doesn't work with Firefox 3 either. (No video shows up, only sound).
Chrome uses Flash 10.1 and cannot be updated since it's internal.
Safari is the only browser that seems to play Flash decently although still a resource hog. Even on 10.1 Firefox stutters every 10-30 seconds unlike Safari. Opera is even less of a choice than Safari since due to lack of proper extensions. Safari crashes when navigating away or closing the tab of http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl . Flash on OSX really is a nightmare. Having to use Safari is painful due to its limited extensions and entire browser crashing with Flash(so much for plugins running under a separate process Apple...); so much so that I'd rather stick with Flash 10.1 on Firefox 4 than the alternatives. (Chrome just uses too much CPU on OSX and extensions are limited in functionality compared to Firefox)
Adobe's demo video http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/stagevideo.html is still using ~70% CPU in flash and 15% CPU in Safari.
GPU usage is 17-20% as monitored with Hardware Monitor 4.9:
Flush.app seems nice, but the firefox plugin BetterPrivacy does this automatically without user intervention.
Unfortunately, the new Flash beta(10.2/10.3) doesn't work properly with Firefox 4 beta.(b8 currently):
Flash Square being 64bit doesn't work with Firefox 3 either. (No video shows up, only sound).
Chrome uses Flash 10.1 and cannot be updated since it's internal.
Safari is the only browser that seems to play Flash decently although still a resource hog. Even on 10.1 Firefox stutters every 10-30 seconds unlike Safari. Opera is even less of a choice than Safari since due to lack of proper extensions. Safari crashes when navigating away or closing the tab of http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl . Flash on OSX really is a nightmare. Having to use Safari is painful due to its limited extensions and entire browser crashing with Flash(so much for plugins running under a separate process Apple...); so much so that I'd rather stick with Flash 10.1 on Firefox 4 than the alternatives. (Chrome just uses too much CPU on OSX and extensions are limited in functionality compared to Firefox)
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And there are extensions that do it for the two major browsers, Chrome and Firefox.
Any for Safari? That would be really, really nice.
I think it's been available for years - since the introduction of flash "cookies" by right clicking on any flash piece in a web page. One can set it per flash piece, or globally. That's still pretty hidden, though. IIRC, it's always been in the same place.
The per piece settings have always been available through a context menu. The global settings have been hidden until 10.1 as I described in the rest of my post that you partially quoted.
http://clicktoflash.com/
Should work.
Personally, I use FlashBlock for Chrome, which only starts loading flash objects when I click on the frame box of the Flash content. It's especially nice for use with StumbleUpon or just general browsing, actually, where some sites will automatically play music or video or something else annoying. This lets me pick what to play. For me, as a Windows user, it has nothing to do with stability problems. Flash doesn't crash here in the PC world. So it seems Adobe just sucks at making Flash work on Macs.
70% cpu usage? thats ridiculous! no wonder steve doesnt want flash on his products.
this is what flash should normally look like (with or without a dedicated GPU)
this screenshot also had 4 vm's running in the background, either way, it should be near idle cpu usage.
this is what flash should normally look like (with or without a dedicated GPU)
this screenshot also had 4 vm's running in the background, either way, it should be near idle cpu usage.
That is really strange because I played the same video on my MacBook Pro 5,5 and it consumes around 30% of the CPU with the CPU utilisation of Safari staying pretty low - could you provide more details on your setup?
On the other side of the river...
With that same video in the background. On my laptop with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600.
And with 4 simultaneous sessions of that same video in the same site.
You can start seeing how there are still a lot of people out there that don't hate Flash. It's because they use Windows.
With that same video in the background. On my laptop with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600.
And with 4 simultaneous sessions of that same video in the same site.
You can start seeing how there are still a lot of people out there that don't hate Flash. It's because they use Windows.
Really? I swear I used that thing back in the Flash 8 days when Flash cookies started to be all the rage.
This page references the Flash 8 player:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html
WARNING - this flash piece contained a script that had to be manually stopped.
Yeah, that's because your MBP 5,5 has a video card that is supported with hardware acceleration. My Early 2008 MBP 4,1 has a 8600M GT. I'm one revision behind the hardware acceleration generation.
I also have a quad core desktop system running windows, so I know what flash is supposed to be running like. 1080P doesn't even break a sweat there. Adobe has always shafted OSX with lazy programmers.
Also, for anyone new to OSX's activity monitor: 100% = full 1 core usage. So my C2D 2.4 will max out @ 200%. My 70-80% usage in activity monitor is actually 35-40% total CPU usage for my hardware; plus another 7.5% for Safari. The other problem with OSX is the process WindowServer which handles drawing everything on the screen; it consumes yet more CPU that Windows doesn't. I'm not sure if it's because of OpenGL's underperforming engine or not.
I believe the Macbook Air that was demoed in Adobe's video is a 1.86Ghz C2Duo. My MBP is a 2.4Ghz C2D. At first they used 80% with just video and 129% CPU with vectors over-layed. Once they switched to the 10.2 beta they were able to use <10% on the lower clock speed MBA(5% total). I'd love to see what my usage would be with a 9600M or 320M...
P.S. Just for kicks I tried watching a 4K video with Flash Square 10.3 and got 1 frame every 2 seconds or so:
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Adobe has never provided a means to selectively run Flash applications. The click-to-flash plugins have all come from third parties. This article showed that flash is turned on and off by globally enabling or disabling plugins on the android phone.
If Adobe had provided a means for end users to selectively run Flash apps on their computers, then advertisers would have never used Flash. Without flash for advertising, Adobe sells far fewer Flash SDKs. It's no surprise that Adobe has never provided a way for the end user to selectively turn off Flash apps in the browser.
Adobe's priority is their developers; Adobe's priority is not the end user experience. Jobs's priority is the end user experience. We should not be surprised there's an impedance mismatch between Apple and Adobe.
There is also an impedance mismatch between Flash and web browsers -- a tremendous overlap in functionality. That overlap has gotten even larger with HTML5.
That page is exactly what I am talking about. The global settings are hidden on that page which was inaccessible from the context menu. You had to know it existed and google it in order to find it. (And, of course, it is still hosted on macromedia.com which is extremely poor from a security perspective. They were bought by Adobe five years ago.)