Nobody's pointing fingers at Adobe or the Macromedia guys. The fact is that there are just quite a few Flash developers out there who design Flash animations that peg your CPU. There are definitely good Flash developers out there as well, but they seem to be in the minority.

I do want to argue your point that a pegged CPU doesn't chew up battery, as it most certainly does. Not only does the processing itself require more electricity, but the resulting fan RPMs that kick in after the CPU has heated up beyond its cooling threshold also sucks quite a bit of charge from the battery.

If I walk by my wife's PowerBook and hear the fans blowing, I'm almost 9 out of 10 times correct in assuming that she's left Safari pointed at a web page that has one or more flash instances on it. I've had to train her to leave Activity Monitor on and to watch the dock icon for a big green box which reminds her that she's got a web page open that's overheating her computer and significantly reducing both its immediate performance and its overall lifespan.

The fact is, my wife "shouldn't have to" worry about these things. All of her other applications behave perfectly well. Perhaps some fingers should be pointed at Adobe for not designing safeguards into the Flash player to avoid this particular problem... as it's definitely a widespread issue.

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