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DramaLLama

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 6, 2011
291
0
I've heard that adobe flash will kill the battery life of a macbook air/macbook pro or whatever.. is this true?
 
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Which is why it's not even allowed to run on iOS devices. Officially ;)
 
Adobe Flash Player is CPU intensive, thus more power is needed to feed the CPU, which results in higher temperatures and often higher fan speed(s) on mobile computers. As more power is used due to Flash, the battery life of mobile computers is shortened by a good bit.
To check, if Adobe Flash Player is responsible for less battery time, go to Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor and select to show ALL PROCESSES and sort by CPU.

There are a variety of Flash blockers for all the four major browsers available.
A Flash blocker does what it says, it blocks Flash content, but via a click on the marked Flash object, the Flash object can be activated and used.

  • Safari: ClickToFlash, for which there is an extension and a plug-In; CTF allows you to download YouTube and other kinds of MPEG-4 encoded video too.
  • Opera: has a built-in Flash blocker
  • Firefox: Flashblock is an add-on to block Flash
  • Chrome: FlashBlock is an extension to block Flash

Also make sure to have the latest Adobe Flash Player version running, you can get it here.
 
Last edited:
Just for clarity's sake, what do you mean by "kill"? If you mean "drain", then yes. It uses a ton of power and will cause the battery to drain really fast. If you mean "degrade the integrity of the battery such that it will fail prematurely", then no.
 
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