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best web browser for flash intensive applications?

O

oregon2

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 7, 2009
130
0
I have a late 2008 unibody Macbook Pro 15" with, unfortunately, only 2GB RAM. My work requires a very intensive internet flash application that will usually max out my RAM, and in combination with certain other applications, my computer becomes so laggy that I cannot work.

This has me wondering... which browser is best for running intensive flash applications? I also like to run lots of random pages at once, so I'll do that as well, either in the same browser, or concurrently in a different one.
 
According to Adobe's own testing, Flash runs best in Safari.

The upcoming 10.1 is "supposed" to bring performance more in line with the Windows version.

Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.

Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on -- for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.

Also, there are variations depending on the browser as well as the OS -- for example, on Windows, IE8 is able to run Flash about 20% faster than Firefox. On the Mac, Safari has the performance lead currently in terms of running Flash.
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