As simurai has expertly demonstrated, a Flashless world does not equal a more CPU-friendly world (fire up a CPU meter with that page open in a modern browser). Clearly, any poorly-written code that finds its way spinning through our processors has the capacity to degrade the user experience, and Ars has found that there seems to be a lot of poorly-written, processor-intensive Flash ads posted up all over the web that chug away at precious cycles and battery life.

Code that harms the overall computer experience is malware. I’m sure that as long as there has been software, there has been malware. Recently, malware showed up in the Android store. But you know where malware hasn’t creeped into? The App Store.

The Flash “problem” is the result of a universal plugin running applications — widgets on webpages — mostly ads — that aren’t regulated by anyone. If only there was some sort of rich interactive advertising network where ads were distributed and regulated in such a way that prevents poorly written code from ever reaching the user. 

How about iAds?

See where this is going?

Apple’s iAd platform really hasn’t had much action, and as far as I know there’s yet to be an advertising experience as rich as the Toy Story 3 demo from apple’s iOS 4.0 announcement. iAds are likely to have the same sort of rigid approval process as iOS apps. They’ll be checked for poor performance, malicious code, and appropriateness. And as soon as developers get used to the rules of the game, we’ll start to see some really intense, engaging ads. But I bet they won’t steal cycles or drain a battery as fast as a similar Flash experience.

Let me end this pontification with the fact that I’m not smarter nor more informed than your average web developer who follows industry news as closely as anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can. So this is all just a hunch, and I’m not really interested in arguing whether this is right, wrong, good, or bad. 

But taking a look at history, this all smells strangely familiar…

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