As the computer market continues to move down in CPU power, price and size, the ability of a standard netbook to run sites like hulu.com has become questionable. The little Atom 1.6GHz processor just doesn’t have enough oomph to play large-format videos. (Youtube.com works great, its just the other sites that are pushing larger resolutions and larger bitrates and more sophisticated codecs).

Additionally, flash is just something that sits there on web pages using up your CPU, and that means that it’s using up your battery, which is bad. So, I’ve disabled flash altogether (via FlashBlock) on my netbook’s configuration, and I’m tempted to do so on my desktop machines as well. FlashBlock gives a nice “click to play” experience that I really prefer over the default of many sites which is to just start playing flash videos & sound as soon as you enter the page.

Maybe the netbook processors are going to improve, and maybe that means that in another year or so flash won’t be such a big deal, but in the interm, I think Adobe is in a pretty bad situation, especially due to the mobile factors I mentioned in my last post…