Recently I uninstalled Flash on both my Windows PC and my MacBook and I was amazed at how much it improved my online experience. Now PC World has gone ahead and run some tests to figure out just how much Flash is a drain on browser performance and has discovered disabling Flash can improve your browser’s performance by as much as 80%.
RELATED: I disabled Flash on my computer and I haven’t enjoyed the web this much in years
How bad is Flash for your browser? PC World found that with Microsoft Edge, having Flash enabled made the application consume 4.72 GB of memory and 84.1% of CPU cycles. Once Flash was disabled, those numbers went down to 4.12GB of memory and 24.5% of CPU cycles.
Things get even more dramatic with the Opera browser, which consumes 3.47 GB of memory and 81.2% of CPU cycles with Flash enabled and just 1.8GB of memory and 6% of CPU cycles with Flash disabled. Installing Flash onto Firefox, meanwhile, meant that “some tabs were unresponsive minutes after loading, and I had to manually check each tab to check on its progress,” which was completely different from how the browser behaved before installing the Flash plugin.
To read PC World’s full test results and to get full instructions for disabling Flash on each of the most popular browsers, be sure to click here. And if you want to just disable Flash entirely from your computer, be sure to check out our guide to uninstalling Flash on your PC or Mac.
But the bottom line is you should dump Flash. You will make the Internet a much better place for doing so and your web browsing experience will be vastly better.
