alt Hacker NewsI disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.
Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.
In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.
> Flash was a real battery sucker on Android
> Flash freezing the entire tab
It's a runtime issue. .swf format is highly optimized, but it was poorly ported to iOS at that time. Adobe didn't even try.
Also the observation is kinda biased. Reimplement the same kind of animation with h5, you'd drain your battery quickly and eat your cpu0 as well. Webkit made lots of optimizations during the years.