[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] dropping flashplugin x86_64

[Jan de Groot]

On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 00:53 -0700, Patrick Burroughs wrote:
> Personally, if it wasn't for HTML5 I wouldn't be able to use YouTube.
> My laptop is ancient and decrepit, and cannot handle Flash on Linux,
> but the <video> element works just fine, and loads as fast as I'm used
> to Flash video loading. Maybe there's a bit of a slowdown versus Flash
> if you have a cutting-edge system, but not everyone is in that
> situation.

I don't care much about performance, but what is irritating is that
whenever some website loads anything flash-related, my CPU gets
speedstepped to max frequency and my laptop fan prepares my laptop for a
takeoff. When you're on battery, this can mean you'll lose half of
battery runtime, just by having a browser window open that includes a
flash banner.
This isn't only a problem on x86_64, but on every non-windows platform.
Maybe it extends to windows also, but I haven't tested that in years.
Besides the performance problem, flash also makes browsers unstable. I'm
very happy with the out-of-process plugins in Firefox 3.6.4 prereleases,
it's just too bad that I don't use firefox for daily browsing.