Have any of you noticed this?
They now have an external application called “plugin-container.exe”.
They’ve done this so that if a Flash app crashes, it doesn’t crash Firefox completely, your other pages remain running, and only the flash page crashes.
However, I think to further prevent crashes they’ve capped the CPU usage.
I thought I would test most of my demos, to see if they run the same in the new Firefox environment.
Some demos that used to run at a solid 60fps now regularly dip to 50fps.
But the weird thing is, they are dipping in framerate without even maxing out 1 core, I’ve tested on 2 computers, and they both show the same behaviour - the CPU usage is maxing out at about 45%.
Before they changed the Flash handling, those demos would need to use around 60% to achieve 60 FPS.
So it seems like this new method runs just as fast, but quite simply they’ve capped the CPU usage.
The behaviour in IE hasn’t changed. They still run at a solid 60fps in IE, with a max CPU usage of around 60%.
In some recent benchmarks I did, Firefox actually slightly outperformed IE in Flash performance (before this new external wrapper), and that was a first actually, because IE used to be faster. Now IE is significantly faster since the introduction of the plugin-container.
How irritating. Because of the plethora of scrubs creating crap Flash that crashes people’s browsers, we get worse performance in Firefox. And more and more people are using Firefox these days, it’s gaining on IE.
I hope they change it soon for better performance.
