1) Flash is awful
2) Flash is the _only_ contributor to power drain so lets vilify it, and let's ignore HTML5 ads for now. (this was DaringFireball's implication)
The article does a wonderful job of demonstrating a very near future where John Gruber's Macbook will have 2 hours of battery life thanks to spinning gerbil HTML5 ads.
Again, I'm all for disabling Flash, but DF's constant championing of HTML5 as a panacea for all of Flash's forthcomings needs to be stopped (it's becoming a religion).
If anything, this article encourages a more constructive discussion than the trolling DF does.
I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.
The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.
Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.
I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to 10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the only thing suffering.
The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the hell is my Mom going to? If it won't just work on one of the most ideal Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.
Not to mention the author can't read.
"As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X"
is the exact opposite of
"Currently it sucks, but I also don’t care about the future"
It says that there are gains by DISABLING flash... and yes, I'll keep my fingers in my ears if it keeps pushing HTML5 and related technologies forward. I hate flash. It is a daily annoyance.