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Flash or no Flash on MBP i7? Mac newbe need advice.

jsoto

jsoto

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 27, 2010
138
9
Chicago
Just switch to the aluminum side recently this past December. I have been a windows user for 12 years. I work in IT so I pretty PC saavy on the windows side. Got drawn to the Apple ecosystem & switched for personal use. Still have windows machines too. Have mainly made the MBP my main machine. :) & haven't looked back or regreted it.

Coming from the windows side Flash has been a part of my web experience. I do have flash installed on the MBP. I have been reading a ton of posts on MR with regards to flash & how bad it is on the Mac. Frankly I was not aware till this year. WoW. I am astonished that the experience was not the same on both sides of the aisle. I am on my second iPhone. First iPhone 3G & now currently iPhone 4. Not having flash on the iPhone did not bother me at all.

My question is should I uninstall Flash on the MBP? How much battery life is improved with the current version of Flash? Will uninstalling Flash improve the life of the MBP? If you are not using Flash on OS X do you have it installed on Bootcamp for your Flash needs? Is bootcamp the way to go for Flash on the Intel Macs?

I know these maybe stupid questions to some. I am by no means a Mac genius or experienced user. I didn't have hard time jumping into the Mac either because of being PC saavy or simply OS X is designed to just hop right on. I can't fully answer that other than, I thought I would have a very hard learning curve. So far it has been great!:D

Many thanks ahead of time for your time & replies!
 
Flash on OS X is nowhere near being so unusable that one would have to utilize bootcamp to troll flash enabled websites (EXCEPT in cases where flash is being used as a wrapper for some windows only based video component, as seen on some websites). Merely having it installed will not detract from your battery life. Certain video cards are optimized better for video due to some enhancements made last year. You will find that for certian applications i.e. games that run smooth on windows will make the same hardware sweat in OS X. Unfortunately that's just the nature of the beast, for now. Anyone who says its one company (apple) or the other (adobe) is ill-informed. Both have made certain decisions that effect how and why flash works different on the two platforms.

You can utilize it at will with clicktoflash which is common fare 'round these Adobe-hating parts.
 
jsoto said:
Just switch to the aluminum side recently this past December. I have been a windows user for 12 years. I work in IT so I pretty PC saavy on the windows side. Got drawn to the Apple ecosystem & switched for personal use. Still have windows machines too. Have mainly made the MBP my main machine. :) & haven't looked back or regreted it.

Coming from the windows side Flash has been a part of my web experience. I do have flash installed on the MBP. I have been reading a ton of posts on MR with regards to flash & how bad it is on the Mac. Frankly I was not aware till this year. WoW. I am astonished that the experience was not the same on both sides of the aisle. I am on my second iPhone. First iPhone 3G & now currently iPhone 4. Not having flash on the iPhone did not bother me at all.

My question is should I uninstall Flash on the MBP? How much battery life is improved with the current version of Flash? Will uninstalling Flash improve the life of the MBP? If you are not using Flash on OS X do you have it installed on Bootcamp for your Flash needs? Is bootcamp the way to go for Flash on the Intel Macs?

I know these maybe stupid questions to some. I am by no means a Mac genius or experienced user. I didn't have hard time jumping into the Mac either because of being PC saavy or simply OS X is designed to just hop right on. I can't fully answer that other than, I thought I would have a very hard learning curve. So far it has been great!:D

Many thanks ahead of time for your time & replies!
Click to expand...

If you are using Safari, I would recommend the plug-in Click 2 Flash. It allows you to choose whether or not you want to activate flash without having to uninstall it, just in case you may need it. It really depends on what you are doing on the web.

I started using it after my Safari kept crashing from those flash-intensive sites. it really made a ton of difference and my Safari experience is tons better.
 
I have it installed but hardly ever use it in the performance side I don't think it matters just having it there but not using it I have noticed really poor battery life and the Mac getting hot on simple tasks while using it tough I like to have it for a just in case I need it just my opinion on the subject.:)

Edit:

Moyank24 said:
I would recommend the plug-in Click 2 Flash.
Click to expand...

Gonna try that.
 
Many thanks I'll look into the ClickToFlash plug-in. I'll leave it installed then.
 
Yes I do use Safari. Believe it or not I have been using it on my Windows machines for over a year for the love of the MobileMe bookmark syncing. I'll look more into the clicktoflash. Many thanks!:)
 
I use Flash everyday. I haven't had issues with it either. Don't listen to others who complain that they have problems with it. Decide if you have problems with it or not.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I've used flash blockers since the dial-up days over a decade ago, before I started using Macs. Flash has always been mostly just a mild annoyance, but I have it installed on OS X and Windows for a rare occassion that a website requires it.
 
I uninstalled Flash but have Chrome installed (it comes with a built-in Flash plugin) in case I really need to view Flash. I rarely do.

The reason I don't use Click2Flash? It's a great plugin and I used it for a long time, but the problem with it is, it reports your browser as having Flash installed. Any sites tracking browser capabilities will mark you down as a Flash user even if you don't see any Flash. Not having it also enables some sites to deliver alternative content (e.g. MacRumors shows static ads rather than Flash ads ... ok, no one wants to see ads but simple static ads are so much easier on the eye, and MacRumors gets the money).

For YouTube, I use the YouTube5 extension.
 
I have noticed flash is not so awesome
I run into beach ball a great deal of times, but this is my only complaint with my apple products ever.
 
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