[Windows Phone 7 General] MooGoo:
HTML5 and Flash are NOTHING alike. When people compare the two, they are really only comparing HTML5's <video> element to video players programed in Flash (yes there is <canvas> but that is not what this debate is about).

Honestly the less Flash on the web the better. Most of the stupid animations that Flash is capable of can be handled easily by cross-browser Javascript libraries that are widely available these days. There is absolutely no reason to use Flash to implement website interface elements such as navbars, much less the entire site. The only sites that still seem to do this are ones that advertise new movies and music albums to easily impressed consumers. Good riddance.

Flash really is a slow, bloated, unstable mess of software and the sooner it is gone from the Internet the better. HOWEVER, that is no reason to not support something that is so wide spread. Yes it feels good to give Flash the shaft, but you know what else would feel pretty good? Dropping all support for every version of Internet Explorer below 8. This would be heaven for web designers, IE6-7 has been making their lives hell for almost 10 years now. But despite this, for any serious website dropping support for older versions of IE would be suicide (yes we can see the light at the end of the tunnel at least for IE6, one day, one day...).

So we keep supporting it, without making lame excuses about how it is not open or some such.

Speaking of which, coming from Apple, that statement is pretty rich. This is a company that has for years been pushing their proprietary QuickTime mov format that can only be played on what is probably the worst video player software in existence. If you had the misfortune of installing this horrendous piece of bloat/spamware, you will be pleasantly surprised to find a useless Q icon in your system tray always helpfully informing you that an update is available (yes a lot of software does this now, but Apple was one of the first, innovative as always). Hell, you'll be lucky to come away from the experience without Safari being installed and becoming your default browser. And even if you could stomach all that, the video player itself is absolutely terrible. Remember that for years Apple wanted you to buy the Pro version just so you could have the incredible ability to play your videos in fullscreen. FULLSCREEN. I'll give Steve Jobs one thing, he's got some serious balls.

Apple would just love it if the entire Internet was using mov files and QuickTime instead of Flash. I'm sure they would license it to no one so everyone would be required to use their innovative products to do trivial tasks.

No matter what Steve Jobs would like to think in his happy little bubble, Flash is still a significant part of the web, for better or worse. Not being able to watch 90% of the videos embeded in websites is a significant handicap for browsing with mobile phones. Up to this point it has not mattered much because even phones that have some form of Flash installed could barley play the videos anyway. Now that we see a lot of 1ghz phones coming out, and Adobe being more active in mobile flash development, this will change and Apple will get left behind unless Steve Jobs can swallow his pride just once.

Maybe I'm wrong though, seeing how happily the world would follow Apple right off a cliff. I mean...seriously, an underpowered keyboardless laptop, that still can't play Flash, and doesn't even have a single frickin USB port. ...this is considered innovative? This is what the world has been freaking out about?

Ugh....I'd give the last 5 minutes of your life back if I could.