After loading all 30 sites, we then waited 30 seconds for things to settle down, before opening Windows 10’s Task Manager and recording the CPU load and memory consumption of both the apps as well as the background processes. But we did it quickly, to try and stress the browser by throwing a number of elements at it, all at once. All these background processes slow your PC down.įrom our list of links, we cut and pasted each link into a new tab, weakly approximating how a user would add one tab, then another. You can dig into the Task Manager (WIN + X) to find out what’s chewing up your system resources. Pages with embedded video, pre-roll advertising, and the like, can take over a minute. Loading a page can take as little as a few seconds, for a text-heavy page with few embedded elements. Measuring the impact on your PCs CPU and RAM is somewhat subjective. We used a Lenovo Yoga 12 notebook with a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-5600U inside, running a 64-bit copy of Windows 10 Pro on 8 GB of memory. With Edge, we toggled Flash on and off, using its built-in control. For Firefox and Opera, we ran our tests without Flash installed, then downloaded the plugin from Adobe’s site. We ignored Apple’s Safari browser-sorry, Apple. We tested Chrome 44, Windows 10’s Edge 12, Firefox 39, Internet Explorer 11, and Opera 31-all the latest versions at press time. Since they are live, there’s always a possibility that ads and content can change from one visit to the next, but we were able to do our live testing over the course of a single day to try and minimize this. Most of them have all sorts of embedded ads and trackers, which the sites use to track you, create a profile, and sell you stuff. But simply using a browser with Flash installed can have major consequences on performance.Īs we did in our Windows 10 review, we used a test bed of 30 live sites, ranging from Amazon to The New York Times to iMore to.

But they don’t impact your day-to-day browsing, right? Maybe not. Vulnerabilities occur in the background, surreptitiously lifting your data, installing rootkits, and the like. Let’s start from the totally naive premise that Flash does not represent a security risk. The Web’s information superhighway is increasingly littered with ads, popups and worse.

Adobe flash testing page