HTML 5 Video Out-Performs Adobe Flash... and Vice Versa

Apple has refused to have a version of Adobe (ADBE) Flash on the iPhone OS. Apple says this is because Flash hogs processor time and that HTML 5, which can play video, will soon replace Flash in the market. Adobe retorts by quoting percentages of sites using Flash rather than HTML for video. However, it turns out that Apple has a point: Flash is a much bigger CPU hog than HTML 5. Then again, HTML 5 is bigger hog than Flash. Confused? According to a set of head-to-head tests, your experience depends on your choice of operating system and browser. Look at this chart by Jan Ozer as an example:

On a Mac, Flash running on Safari takes three times the CPU cycles as HTML 5, and clearly Apple has what you might call a controlling interest in user system performance. And that was on a MacBook Pro. Given that the iPhone processor will have nowhere near the power, and that the iPad runs on lean-and-mean custom silicon, neither may have the needed horsepower. On a Windows box, the story was different:

In the test, the one browser that permitted a comparison between Flash and HTML 5 was Chrome, and there Flash was the clear leader. One big reason for the difference is that Flash can directly use graphics processor hardware acceleration on Windows, but not on Mac OS or Linux.

An aside: notice how little support there was on Windows for HTML 5. That is likely due to how the browsers actually support the standard. For example, Firefox supports HTML video delivery, but only in specific ways. YouTube's HTML 5 player only supports Google (GOOG) Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame. So those who want to predict the quick ascendancy of HTML 5 over Flash may have some waiting to do on the large number of computers that run Windows.

Images via RGBStock.com user hisks, site standard license.