Is Flash video on a Mac a CPU hog?  More than on Windows? If so, why?



Thankfully, someone’s finally done a test to put some data behind the anecdotes.  (Doh!  Why I didn’t think of doing that?!?) Jan Ozer over at the Streaming Learning Center hastested Flash video vs. HTML5 video, covering all the browsers on both Windows and (Intel) Mac, and Flash versions 10.0 and (the new, performance-optimized) 10.1.



It’s hard to summarize the findings without leaving out important detail, so I recommend looking at Jan’s data directly.  The tables are revealing.  But in a nutshell, Jan found that where the video decoder can access hardware acceleration, performance is excellent, and where it can’t…not so much.  This means that on Windows, Flash is actually slightly more CPU-efficient than HTML5. On the Mac, where Apple has not made API hooks to its graphics hardware acceleration available to software developers, Flash and HTML5 are both hogs – unless you’re using HTML5 in Safari.  It suggests that Apple is using graphics acceleration APIs that it’s keeping from others who are developing applications for the Mac. (Kinda smells like what Microsoft was accused of years ago – keeping various Windows APIs secret so that its non-OS products would always have an advantage over  competitors. Microsoft has denied this. )  



Is it fair – or smart – to withhold powerful APIs from the devleopers who create the applications that make your computer useful and relevant to users?  At best. it’s disingenuous for Apple to criticize Adobe for Flash performance on the Mac while keeping access to hardware acceleration under wraps.  



In any case, Jan’s tests show that Adobe is continuing to work on this (to the extent that it can).  Video performance in Flash 10.1 is improved over 10.0 on both Mac and Windows. On Windows, the difference is dramatic.

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