Since I was little, I liked silence when working. It helps me thinking better and organize my thoughts. You might wonder what's this got to do with Flash - there's a connection :) - see below for more.

Recently, I've migrated to Firefox - and tabbed browsing. Firefox is a gret browser, but I've started to read a lot of blogs, and I am usually open all these posts in new tabs. That's how I get to have 20-40 tabs opened in a time.

Sites I visit sometimes play Flash videos or animations - and multiplying this with 30 - you get 100% CPU power used without any power from my side to stop it. On my laptop, 100% CPU power means a cooler working in "heavy load" - and this makes a lot of noise.

Now Google is experimenting with Flash video, and Internet explorer is implementing multi-tabbed browsing.

I see a dark future - 100% CPU power - and noise. If Flash don't learn about the multi-tabbing, and is not capable of "stop" when the tab is not active - I see it as a major future annoyance - the 2006-7 "skip intro 2" syndrom.

As compared with Flash - Ajax don't have this problem. Ajax is not regularily used for "banner animations", but only for "user interaction animations" - and they imply that the user is really using that specific tab.

What do you think? Should Flash be inactive when a tab is hidden? I think I'll experiment and create an extension for Firefox to do this :) stop all the flash movies when a tab is disabled.