⇥ Flash will eat your children!

Except for the occasional post, I don’t usually talk much about the whole Apple-vs.-Flash feud. Frankly, it seems a little pointless: Apple makes its choices, and we as consumers get to vote with our wallet—end of story.

Every now and then, however, I come across some articles in which reality bends and stretches like a ball of delicious mozzarella cheese, and I just can’t resist adding a few toppings of my own. So, here we go.

Ars Technica has recently published a long and extremely detailed review of Apple’s new MacBook Air. Within it lies this very astute observation:

We did find (quite by accident) that Apple may have more reasons behind not installing Flash by default other than the stated reason of ensuring that users always have the most up-to-date version. Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of Websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02—with the exact same set of Websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.

Now, I read this paragraph as a small sideways poke at Apple’s motivations for keeping Flash off of their new computers by default. A number of other people have, instead, chosen to interpret it as saying that Flash sucks the battery life out of computers—a bit like shoving the business end of a Dyson into your mouth, I suppose.

Wait, what?

To be entirely honest, I find this conclusion really strange.

My personal experience with the latest generation of open-standard technologies^{The Wilderness Downtown: on launch, it pegs both cores of my 2009 17″ MacBook Pro, makes my fans sound like the laptop is about to take off from my desk, and dramatically reduces battery life if I’m not connected to a power outlet.}

And, to be frank, this stands to reason. Either Flash is developed by incompetent programmers—possible, I suppose, but not all that likely—or both it and HTML5 can only be optimized to a degree; eventually, you will hit against raw GPU and CPU power requirements that you won’t be able to get around; therefore, the more intensive your Web-based applications become, the more power you will need to run them. Don’t just take my word for it—look up “HTML5 vs. Flash performance benchmarks” on your favourite search engine, and you will find that Flash has generally higher performance than HTML5, though most seem to agree that the latter is bound to eventually catch up (as it should). This blog post, for example, has some hard numbers.

Flash is not the enemy: advertisers are

This brings us back to the role of Flash in consuming battery life and why it’s a red herring.

I think we can all agree that Flash ads are something we could easily do without, but what I think most people are annoyed by are the ads themselves; Flash is simply the catalyst that makes it possible for advertisers to create them and, therefore, presents itself as the ideal target for our displeasure.

So, block Flash, block the annoying ads, right? Well, here’s the thing: what happens when the advertisers decide to move away from Flash?

The reality is that advertisers want the kind of ads that Flash allows them to produce, and they are willing to pay a premium both to create and to serve them. And, I suspect, all this happens because we, the users, have shown through our browsing habits that we are more likely to pay attention to those ads, too.

If Flash should go away, advertisers will simply move on to creating the same kind of ads in HTML5. At that point, we will still get the same annoying ads and their consequent waste of battery energy; the only exception will be that we will be denied the option of getting rid of them altogether by simply blocking Flash.

To make the obligatory car analogy, dropping Flash ads would be like rolling up your windows on a hot day to reduce drag and save on gas—sooner or later, you’ll want to turn on the A/C, which means that you will consume nonetheless². That’s why I thought that Ars’ observation is spot on (and they should have taken Apple to task for it).

Mandatory disclaimers

To bring this post to a conclusion, I am supposed to tell you that the fact Adobe is a client of Blue Parabola and that therefore my opinion could be biased. After all, there are some people who have made it their mission in life to remind me when I don’t.

Let me also say this, however: I am perfectly happy with HTML5 gaining popularity and becoming the standard of reference for Web-based applications (or for whatever else it is that people decide to use it for). My interest in Flash lies in a completely different field of application—cross-platform development—which I think is where its future lies anyway.

But there also has to be a bit of perspective and intellectual honesty behind the push for HTML5. Companies like Apple should tout its advantages, like openness and collaborative evolution, and recognize its shortcomings, like fragmentation and inconsistency. Constructing straw men out of shallow analysis just seems to me like a poor way to move the discussion forward.