Lately we talked quite a bit about Flash, and especially about the competitive new technology – still under development – HTML5. We love new technology, especially the rebellious one with stiff middle fingers, therefore we were among the first to cheer for it. But guess what? New tests shows that Flash 10.1 is much more performant than HTML5.
As you might know, Adobe is working on Flash 10.1 for Mac for quite some time, completely rewriting it in Cocoa 64-bit. Recent test shows that it is much more performant than HTML 5, and Flash isn’t always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.
Mac Tests
- With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
- With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
- With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome
Windows Tests
- Safari wouldn’t play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
- Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
- On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
- In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU
Full results here.