Wired and Ars I'm disappointed in you

Just in case this comment doesn't get approved by Wired I thought I'd through it up here. Basically this is my response to this incredibly amateur bit of tech "journalism":

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/lack-of-flash-gives-macbook-air-two-extra-hours-of-battery-life/

My comment:

What version of Flash were they using? There are some major differences between the current minor versions as well as in some of the beta versions. Only recently was Adobe even able to add in GPU acceleration.

Did they do side by side comparisons of video playback between HTML5 and Flash video? Playing back HD video is processor intensive no matter how you slice it. I'd suggest you need to try playback with VLC of the same video as well for an accurate comparison.

And then let's get to their biggest complaint, the Flash ads. Here I would squarely pin the blame on the people creating the ads, not on the Flash Player. The ad industry has a long standing history of hiring cheap, low skill talent to create banner ads. The result are poorly constructed swf's that burn cpu cycles and don't consider performance at all. It will be equally possible to build the same junk using HTML5 that burns up the cpu too.

If you read this again and actually think about what they are comparing, rich media ads verses static jpgs, of course one is going to use more power. What does the playback mechanism have to do with this?

And the closing quote made me laugh out loud, "and the world gets the hint that maybe Flash isn't as ubiquitous as it used to be." Did you miss the headlines about Skyfire being pulled from the App Store yesterday because their servers couldn't keep up with the demand to deliver Flash video content to people's iPhones? Flash is everywhere. Each day I have to deal with the stupid little blue lego icon on my iPad because something I want to use or view is in Flash.

Finally, for a refresher on just how ubiquitous Flash is and is going to be in the coming years go watch Adobe's keynote from Adobe MAX. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2010-keynotes/adobe-max-2010-keynote-day-1-welcome-to-the-revolution/

Both Ars and Wired are guilty of some extremely bad reporting on this one.

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