YouTube + Flash Plugin + Firefox = CPU Cook

[Bloodwych]

Above, I kept on mentioning how a Google search soon brings up loads of threads about this issue.

This article in particular really describes the problem in detail:

http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/20...x-cpu-bug.html

....and lays the blame at the closed source Flash player, although admits Firefox has some issues itself. Since users of other browsers have reported similar issues, I tend to agree that Flash really needs to sort out its non-ActiveX plugin.

[Harrison]

It's a little more complex. The problem with Active-X is that the technology is Microsoft exclusive, so other browsers/platforms don't utilise it. If this reason it is normally bad coding practice to use Active-X control in flash moves to call external browser control when you want a flash file to be cross browser compatible.

As for blaming Flash because it is closed source, just imagine how quickly Macromedia, and now Adobe, would have lost their ground in the Shockwave/Flash market if they had allowed the whole code base to be open source. The made the final output format SWF open source so that other application developers could support it and make it a universal online vector format, which was a great move, but I support the decision to keep the actual Flash source code closed. Imagine if Microsoft could suddenly get their hands on the open source for Flash. It would mean the quick death of Adobe!

[Bloodwych]

I hear what you're saying, but the issue remains for some users and the common denominator is Flash randomly eating up CPU cycles to insane levels for relatively simple tasks, but worst of all creating a constant high load in certain situations where it should be relatively idle.

Adobe, with its closed source, should be more responsible for how their Flash product is affecting the internet, laptops and users PC's. It seems to me it works fine with IE, but not so well in other browsers. More work has to be done to improve this, but I'd imagine one side simply blames the other!

It could of course be the Flash writers themselves writing CPU hogging adverts, menus and players without optimizing. I did see a few articles on the net urging web page designers writing Flash applications to be responsible and check/optimize CPU usage.

Regardless of the issues, I'm finished with the problem. I can't do anything about it beyond report the issue to Adobe and Mozilla and hope others have done the same. If a fix comes out great, if not then I've done all I can. With the continuing rise of dual core CPUs, the problem is probably only going to get worse as Flash can hog one core without the user really knowing the difference - unless they've got a single core CPU.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

[Harrison]

Badly optimised actionscript code within a flash file could definitely be a big cause of browser problems. Especially if they have coded active X controls that other browsers cannot interpret, leading to the flash file semi hanging the browser and increasing the CPU load while it tried to debug the error. Other causes could be large image and other files used in the flash files asset library.

All these are poor excuses though as Flash has always had a great optimisation system built in where you can analyse a flash file, how it loads, where the peeks and dips in loading bandwidth are, as well as many other things.

Flash Video is in itself quite a new format though, and with Adobe taking over Macromedia just after this ability was added to flash could be some more reasons for recent bugs in the format.