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So one of the big memes Adobe is pushing in the endless Flash whining is that if mean old Apple would just give them the low-level APIs they need, they could do all this wonderful acceleration, and all that CPU utilization the Flash plugin needs would go away, and life would be fantastic.

This of course, is bullshit, and it's pandering bullshit to boot. CPU utilization, expressed in Mac OS X as a percentage in either top or Activity Monitor, is a great number. It's easy to measure, easy to spot, and even the non-technophile can look at it and grok what that number is saying. There's a problem though...

CPU utilization is not a great metric, in fact, it's barely a metric at all, and Adobe's pushing of it is asinine. First, a high CPU utilization is, in and of itself, not bad. If you're doing something that is CPU-intensive, such as iDVD crunching video, then it is perfectly acceptable and logical to have high CPU utilization. The idea that "zero" is the only perfect number is the implication of Adobe's attempts to blame Apple, and it is, again, asinine. High CPU utilization is only bad if it is causing other processes to not run correctly, or, once a process no longer needs that much CPU, it still keeps eating it. There's a technical term for this, and it's called "That process has lost its damned mind, we'll have to kill that sucker daid."

The problem with the Flash plugin is not high CPU utilization. It's that the demented little fucker spinlocks your browser, even while using almost unmeasurable CPU. Just recently, I'm on the Huffington Post, and of course, the browser spinlocks. It's, of course, waiting for a Flash ad to load. Safari's CPU load? Well, it's locked, so hard to tell, but last reading was zero. The Flash plugin process? Zero to four percent.

Yet there's Safari, locked up all to hell.

So no, it's not all about CPU. It's all about a plugin doing stupid shit.

Dear Adobe: Stop Crashing My Browser.

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