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I have always had this terrible habit of opening oodles of tabs, and my (windows) pc used to become really sluggish after a while, usually leading up to an actu

I have always had this terrible habit of opening oodles of tabs, and my (windows) pc used to become really sluggish after a while, usually leading up to an actual crash within a matter of days (never closing my browser, and suspending/hibernating the laptop but not rebooting or shutting it down). I then noticed that restarting the browser (which was, back then, just one of many open apps) instantly removed this sluggishness, and no more crashes - unless I forgot to restart the browser (I say "the browser" here because this happened regardless of which one I was using, out of IE, Chrome or Firefox). Some time later, I set up a really underpowered Atom netbook for a friend, and, horrified at the slowdown when visiting some heavier pages, I tried to help with noScript (which didn't really work for my non-tech friend) and a "Click-to-play Flash" extension, and I marvelled at the difference it made. I soon started using it on my own laptop and immediately noticed that slowdowns and crashes had stopped occurring even if I didn't restart the browser for weeks. I decided to completely uninstall Flash from Firefox, and for the few sites which absolutely required it I'd use Chrome which shipped with it - and recommended the same to most people I know, receiving the same feedback. Years later, the "thoughts on Flash" memo came out, and I though "hey, cool, I got there faster than Steve". I have hated Flash ever since my realization, irrespective of the security issues it was riddled (sorry if the word triggers you) with, and ditto with Acrobat Reader. I've come to consider Adobe a producer of awful, bloated, insecure and shitty software, and my computers are better off without any of it. I do love the PDF standard, just not Adobe's software for producing/consuming PDF documents.

josephg 5y ago
Yeah I remember that. At the time, the web browsers were starting to aggressively throttle javascript on background tabs so badly behaved tabs wouldn't impact performance. But the throttling behaviour didn't work for flash. And flash banner ads were popular for some ridiculous reason. I watch CPU usage closely, and for awhile there most of the time my CPU got pegged was because some random flash banner ("Click the monkey" crap) went out of control and started busy-looping in a background tab. I'd often came back to my computer to discover some random tab I had open was melting my computer. I hated flash for that. But there was an easy solution. Pretty soon after that I installed a click-to-play flash extension; and the problem went away overnight. About 90% of the flash content my browser ever loaded was advertising, so it was like a lightweight ad blocker for the worst ads. Pretty soon Chrome built that behaviour into their web browser. And that was the beginning of the end for flash. Steve Jobs did finish flash off when he blocked it on the iphone. But that didn't come out of nowhere. He first challenged Adobe to make Flash perform well on mobile devices. But Adobe couldn't meet his challenge. Flash never worked well enough on the low power smartphones of the day. People can blame Steve Jobs all they like, but flash would still be alive and well if Adobe had been able to ship a performant browser extension when it counted. But they didn't. And now their product is dead. I pity the creators who made flash professionally, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Adobe.
- mobilio 5y ago
  I remember this. Then i have CPU C2Q 6600. And opening one site with 10 tabs i can see CPU spike up to 100% of all cores. I found "click-to-flash" and some plugin for YT-to-HTML5 and this suddenly fix mine issues. Mobile flash even didn't works good on high-end mobile devices because consume too much power. Since that devices are limited from their battery Flash was resource hog.

josephg 5y ago

Yeah I remember that. At the time, the web browsers were starting to aggressively throttle javascript on background tabs so badly behaved tabs wouldn't impact performance. But the throttling behaviour didn't work for flash. And flash banner ads were popular for some ridiculous reason. I watch CPU usage closely, and for awhile there most of the time my CPU got pegged was because some random flash banner ("Click the monkey" crap) went out of control and started busy-looping in a background tab. I'd often came back to my computer to discover some random tab I had open was melting my computer. I hated flash for that. But there was an easy solution. Pretty soon after that I installed a click-to-play flash extension; and the problem went away overnight. About 90% of the flash content my browser ever loaded was advertising, so it was like a lightweight ad blocker for the worst ads. Pretty soon Chrome built that behaviour into their web browser. And that was the beginning of the end for flash. Steve Jobs did finish flash off when he blocked it on the iphone. But that didn't come out of nowhere. He first challenged Adobe to make Flash perform well on mobile devices. But Adobe couldn't meet his challenge. Flash never worked well enough on the low power smartphones of the day. People can blame Steve Jobs all they like, but flash would still be alive and well if Adobe had been able to ship a performant browser extension when it counted. But they didn't. And now their product is dead. I pity the creators who made flash professionally, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Adobe.

mobilio 5y ago
I remember this. Then i have CPU C2Q 6600. And opening one site with 10 tabs i can see CPU spike up to 100% of all cores. I found "click-to-flash" and some plugin for YT-to-HTML5 and this suddenly fix mine issues. Mobile flash even didn't works good on high-end mobile devices because consume too much power. Since that devices are limited from their battery Flash was resource hog.