Snow Leopard vs The Flash Player plugin…
There is no hiding that I’m a massive Mac freak, and recently seeing the new shiny 27″ iMac’s arrive in the office Its just made me want one at home even though I don’t need one.
I have an early 2008 MacBook and a late 2008 iMac both with Snow Leapord on since it was released, and ok there was a screw up with the flash player released with it, but that was rectified, however I know I wasn’t the only one to notice how utterly terrible Flash player was in Safari, the tweets were flying about fast. It seems The plugin now functions as a plugin and if Flash falls over Safari looks down on it as if to say “get up you bloated bastard”, which is fair enough, why should the whole Safari app crash just because the Flash Player did.
This was happening often though, and sites were running as if they were set at 12fps. I couldn’t go to a web page on my MacBook without it sounding like it was going to burst into flames from the fans going like mad, and the animation looking like it was streaming on a 28k connection, so I opened activity monitor, only to see:
Flash Player (Safari Internet plug-in) %CPU 121.1
Really…. No wonder it was dying.
This week however Apple released the 10.6.2 update, and for anyone who hasn’t got it yet, I highly recommend it. The whole OS seems snappier, fluid and more stable, and yes Flash seems to have settled down it smoother and less CPU intensive, the same website that caused the major CPU usage was not halved at 62%.
It’s still not perfect though, Flash player on the Mac has been behind the Windows version for a while now, especially with fullscreen video my fans still go crazy, I don’t get this only Bootcamps Windows install, however some friends have said the Flash Player on windows is being a pain as well. I’m not opening a can of worms with Mac OSX vx Windows, it’s pointless. My choice of OS is OSX and I use vmware to jump in to windows if I need to.
I think maybe it’s time Adobe looked at the Mac version of the Flash player and really try to streamline it, I don’t know if they will in the next version we’ll have to wait and see. Apple seem to have done their bit Adobe I think it’s time you started as well. This said though, all of my blame is not pointed to the two giants Apple and Adobe, i’m sure they do their best, the blame is also with us (the flash community), sloppy coding and poor optimisation is sure to lead to higher CPU usage, this is true for any coding language. Grant Skinner does a lot on code code optimisation, as does Joa Ebert. There are also tools like Mr Doobs Stats plugin which I use of every project I do.
Thats just my thoughts, I have many others but I could go on for days, anyone else thoughts on the situation are more than welcome.
