Apple and Adobe have been fighting about Flash for what seems like eons now. The latest battle ground is Mac OS X Lion where Flash is having all sort of issues including hogging the CPU, draining battery life and heating up computers.

As part of a long document detailing Adobe product issues following the Mac OS X Lion upgrade, Adobe originally seemed to blame Apple for the problems but it’s now changed its tune…

The notes originally said: “Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration.” That suggested that Apple had changed settings and caused the problem. Adobe has now updated its guidance and the picture looks a little different:

The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.

Worryingly the wording used by Adobe there suggests it put Flash through its paces on just one version of Mac OS X Lion despite developer previews having been available since February. Other Adobe software listed as having a hard time with Mac OS X Lion includes Acrobat, Adobe Drive, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Illustrator, Lightroom, LiveCycle, Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

Have you been frustrated by Flash while using Mac OS X Lion? Let us know in the comments.

Out now | £free | Adobe

  • Seb

    I though that generating additional heat, was a new feature in Lion… But as it turned out, it is just Adobe bug …

  • Mgwebmail

    Megavideo sucks since Lion…

    • Anonymous

      Yeah Flash video isn’t great so far – you can bet Adobe will remedy this quickly though.

  • Scruse

    youtube is horrible on lion

  • Anonymous

    Hmm, I don’t like using the YouTube app, slow and wast time. Luckily I use the iFunia YouTube tool, that it have YouTube downloading function, and works fine after I update to Lion.

  • http://twitter.com/elenitaaah Elenita Rodrigues

    Yes, i did have Adobe-specific problems when using the new Lion OS. I really do NOT think Adobe’s treatment of Lion is fair!!! As it seems Adobe doesn’t have any intention to develop the softwares… I used to do twitcams everyweek, and I can’t anymore.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001609311260 Jordan Shepherd

    This is the only issue I have with OSX Lion. Flash uses up so much CPU, it’s ridiculous! Everything slows down, my computer heats up and I have fan noise. I never EVER used to have a heat and fan noise problem with Snow Leopard. I’m very disappointed and I hope this issue can be resolved soon. 

    • Anonymous

      Yeah it’s the only gripe I have with it – however Adobe does admit it’s in beta and I’d expect it’ll fix it quite promptly.

  • foofingers

    Flash uses up to 35% of CPU, it get’s HOT, slows down everything and video refreshes at 1 frame per second. I’m not kidding. This is horrible.. Installed Flash version 10.3.183.5 thinking it would fix some of the big problems but no luck. Lion is amazing though :D . So I guess I’ll be waiting for Adobe to do it’s part.

  • Kormaur

    I find flash to be a major drain on my computer’s resources since I updated to Lion. Performance drain is sometimes so bad I’ve considered downgrading to Snow Leopard.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000671660983 Rejean Brandt

    I regret upgrading to Lion.  I’ve had nothing but continuous lag issues.  It takes about 5 mins to load webpages with Flash, and too often my computer freezes with only the spinning wheel icon being able to move.  I can’t even go to the Apple logo up top to force quit anything.  Reboot is my only solution… at least Lion auto saves right?

Hot chat, right here!


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