Here’s How Much Your System Resources Flash Can Use
We already know that enabling Flash in your browser can affect your computer’s performance and, among other factors, slow down the transition to crawling . PCWorld ran several tests to find out how important Flash is.
In a word: significant. In both Microsoft Edge and Opera, enabling Flash consumed over 80% of the test machine’s CPU cycles, compared with 33% and 7%, respectively, without Flash. Flash also consumed a significant amount of memory in both browsers.
Firefox’s benchmarks were less dramatic, but the impressions remained the same:
Fire Fox? Well, Firefox did a pretty good job too when you removed Flash from the equation. It consumed 1.65 GB and only 24.5% CPU. But after I downloaded Flash, Firefox seemed to be holding itself back. The browser never climbed above 29.1% CPU, but some tabs were unresponsive a few minutes after loading and I had to manually check each tab to keep track of its progress. This was completely unacceptable.
There is no comparison for Chrome in this article, which notes that with Flash enabled, Chrome consumed 4.23GB of memory and 71.4% CPU, which is better than Microsoft Edge. However, PCWorld Senior Editor Mark Hachman told me that there is a difference for Chrome with Flash disabled, but those numbers will be revealed in an upcoming browser review they are conducting. Until then, you can test yourself by going to chrome: // plugins and disabling Flash.
For this test, PCWorld used a Lenovo Yoga 12 laptop with an Intel Core i7 processor, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and 8GB of memory. They loaded 30 sites into separate tabs and then recorded the CPU load and memory consumption – for the latest browsers with and without Flash installed or enabled.
YMMV. Some sites do not work without Flash, your computer may have better or worse performance than this test system, and you cannot be a user of a browser with 30 tabs at the same time. But if you want other reasons to uninstall or disable Flash (besides privacy issues and frequent security vulnerabilities), this could be another major issue .
Alternatively, you can use the browser’s Flash launch feature to enable it only when needed.
Tested: How Flash Degrades Your Browser Performance | PCWorld