Flash is a language runtime, similar to Java, where we process compiled bytecode written by developers, and we do the low-level work of allocating memory and drawing pixels to the screen.
Flash Player doesn't have anything to do with thermal management on the laptop, but people (including me) typically don't like when the fans come on.
The fact that the fans are on doesn't mean that the laptop is overheating. It's just using enough power that it requires the fans to run. The case is aluminum because it passively conducts heat out into the surrounding air. Having the laptop on a soft surface that blocks the fans or limits the case's ability to conduct heat away from the internal components will definitely impact the laptop's ability to cool itself. It also doesn't hurt to blow the dust bunnies out of the fans with some compressed air once in a while. That said, cooling issues don't have anything to do with Flash, beyond the fact that it's using available compute resources, and they're throwing off some heat as part of their normal operation.
The hardware in modern laptops typically has a low-power/low-thermal-output mode, which helps to conserve battery life at the expense of performance. If the laptop is mostly idle, you can often get away with passive cooling, which means that you're not using batteries to spin fans, and the CPUs are using the least possible amount of power. This in turn gets you quiet operation and long battery life. If the content on the page requires a lot of computation, then those components will go into full-power mode, which starts the active cooling regimen, and uses more battery power for both operation and cooling.
The amount of CPU cycles consumed by Flash Player are directly related to the code that the content provider has written, and the sheer number of flash-related things they've stuck on the page. If a website is performing poorly, your options generally fall into the categories of "complain to the content provider", "vote with your feet and find the content elsewhere", and "experiment with other browsers and/or ad-blockers".
Typically what's going on when you're browsing a website or news article and all the fans come on, is that the content provider has embedded a bunch of ads and tracking scripts on to their page. In a world where content is free, ads pay the bills, and there's this whole complex ecosystem where the content provider has to prove to the advertiser that their ads were shown, and the advertiser has to pay the content provider and they want to know how their ads are performing, how people are using the website, etc. Much of the work in browsers lately around power management is really about blocking ads and tracking software, which are generally the real culprits in the situation.
It's not abnormal to see sites stuff dozens of ads and tracking scripts on to a single page, and in some instances, we'll see "ad stuffing", where there are dozens and dozens of ads on a page, but many aren't visible because they've drawn other stuff on top of them. When advertisers are paying per "impression", people can abuse the system to get more revenue that way. To combat it, the advertiser will then need some other tracking script to validate that their ad is visible, and you just end up with all this bloat on the page.
Long story short, the content provider is best positioned to troubleshoot and fix this. We provide a free performance profiling tool called Adobe Scout that will let them identify slow code in their content and optimize it. In 99.99% of instances, this is all that's really required. In the event that the content provider truly identifies a language-level issue that needs our attention, they'll have a detailed root-cause analysis at that point, and we'd be happy to have an engineering-level discussion with them.
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