Duane, I have seen FT.Com, a Financial Times website, eat up ALL of my available CPU. Not having the tools mentioned, I can't say that it was the hyperactive Flash ads, but with my limited ability to read source, I couldn't see anything else likely. Closing the page put CPU level at near-zero; re-opening it or another FT.Com article and we're off to the races.

I complained to the webmaster, got no reply and just don't go there any more, so can't say it's still a problem. Not exactly a traffic enhancer, tho.

There is lousy quality control of Flash, and with the <b>very uneven implementation across different browsers</b>, even reasonable attempts to proof displays mightn't catch the horriffic results that some subtlety caused.

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Agree. Like any technology, it can be used for good or evil, written elegantly and efficiently or produced in steaming piles of butt-ugly code. I have seen some really bad flash coding but this is not unique to flash. One can also create abusive HTML, AJAX or even graphics. One guy once made a JPG by creating an HTML table that loaded individual pixels of different colors. <belch>!!

Unfortunately, there is no real way to avoid people doing bad things. My group (Adobe Evangelism) really tries hard to promote proper code practices and usage of the Flex Profiler so developers can see what memory they are consuming. We have tons of workshops for people to share (not just Flash but HTML, Cold Fusion, PDF, CSS, and just about every other standard.

I think the base of the problem is that the tools make it so easy to create Flash sites now that people who haven't taken the time to understand how the Flash player works at runtime are just doing stuff the way they can get it done and not optimizing the code. I'm guilty of this. Seems like an optimization suggestion tool for multiple technologies would make a lot of sense. Sometimes the issue is caused by sites that also use combinations of technologies or have too much remote loading etc too.

Duane

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The Hulu video player keeps my Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro at ~70% on both cores, giving me about 2/3 of my normal battery life. Not exactly scientific, but Flash can make a difference.

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Sorry, meant to reply to the post immediately above grandparent on main page. Just an example.

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On FT.com, it's Apple's lousy Javascript engine that sucks. All your available CPU power. Same happens when you open "Dash"board.

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Somebody should make a code optimizer reporter for all web technologies. The problem is just going to get worse with JavaFX, Silverlightm, Curl and others. Imagine some dumbass using all of these plus flash and remote objects on one page?

<GAH!>

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