I was wondering why my laptop was not idle when I wasn’t using it, because when I picked it up I burned my hand.
Using the handy-dandy Task Manager, I saw that Mozilla Firefox was using 25% of this 1.8GHz Intel Centrino Duo. Why would it be doing that? I’m not browsing the web, nor did I leave one of my tabs open to a new-fangled Web 2.0 site that thinks I need it to update itself every 30 seconds. I was idle. And by idle I mean that I was outside trimming the shrubs, not sitting in front of my computer.
Well, turns it that some advertisement or other written in Adobe Flash was eating that CPU time. Since I didn’t identify the advertisement, and since Adobe either provides a means for the author to disable my ability to stop the movies from playing, or simply does not provide a means for me to stop the movies from playing, I figure that Adobe owes me the cost of the energy drained by 25% of two 1.8GHz processors over the course of the 12 hours between the time I installed the Flash player to watch some idiot video on YouTube, then enjoyed my Father’s Day offline, and the time when I disabled the Flash player because I had first degree burns on my thighs.
Oh, by the way, Google, now that you’ve bought DoubleClick, if wouldn’t mind simply discontinuing the use of Flash advertisements because they’re evil, we’d love you for it. Thanks.
Thanks for solving this mystery.
I think the Web would be a better place if we keep it simple and forget Flash and go back to using the tag instead, but I’m a Luddite like that sometimes.