Reduce CPU usage while watching Flash movies

Mar 04, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: eckbert

If, like me, you hate it when your MacBook's fans start to whine while watching YouTube, you should skip Safari (even 4.0 Beta) and try OmniWeb (now a free product) or Camino instead. A comparison of the Activity Monitor results, using the same video in each browser, showed these figures:

Safari 4.0 Beta 
  Safari         50%
  Window Server  12%
OmniWeb 5.9
  OmniWeb        36%
  Window Server   5%
Camino 1.6
  Camino         33%
  Window Server   5%
Here are some screen grabs showing each browser's performance. Further remarkable is the fact that Camino split the workload across the cores nearly evenly. I tested on a Macbook 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM running OS X 10.4.11.

[robg adds: I did a quick test using my 2.66GHz Quad Core Mac Pro (running 10.5.6) and an HD-quality video on YouTube. I also added Firefox to the mix, and my results were a bit different than above. On my machine, for the video I was testing with, Camino was also the clear winner at around 80% CPU usage. However, there wasn't any notable difference between OmniWeb, Firefox, and Safari 4.0 Beta -- all three were in the 115%-125% range. More experimentation is needed, but it definitely seems that Camino does the best job of minimizing CPU usage during Flash playback.]

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