I'm still looking at 6h of flash video on one battery... Maybe I'm missing something?

Regardless, I don't see how Flash can claim that Apple isn't providing access to the GPU? I mean... It's a standard API for crying out loud. If anything, I am more inclined to believe that Adobe are not playing ball.

Do me a favour, all of you Apple naysayers because the iPhone and iPad doesn't support Flash: Look up to the address bar in your browser, and tell me what domain this forum is hosted at. maemo.org. That's right. MAEMO. An OPEN SOURCE operating system. And you're arguing that Apple is the bad guy for not supporting -- and actively fighting -- against some proprietary, crash-prone and badly engineering piece of software?

Tim Cook, an Apple executive, was quoted a year ago saying the following:

And quite frankly, that's pretty close to the general philosophy behind Open Source. The truth is that Flash is main cause of crashes on Macs. It's even the main cause of crashes in microb. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the main cause of crashes in Firefox and Internet Explorer, either.

During a keynote, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Bertrand Serlet was explaining the new web content plugin mechanism for Safari in Snow Leopard. Rather than run within Safari’s application process, web content plugins now run in their own process, so if they crash, they (usually) don’t crash Safari itself. You get a broken little rectangle in the page where the plugin was executing, but the browser itself stays running.

Apple did this for two reasons. Serlet’s stated reason on stage was “crash resistance”, as mentioned above. As for why such crash resistance was worth implementing, Serlet explained that, based on data from the Crash Reporter application built into Mac OS X -- the thing that asks if you’d like to send crash data to Apple after a crash -- the most frequent cause of crashes across all of Mac OS X are (or at least were, pre-Snow Leopard) “plugins”.

What does this mean? Well, simply put, think of how ubiquitous Flash is. Nearly everyone who has a browser open has some Flash content playing, somewhere. Flash isn't a foolproof technology, and its stability highly depends on the quality of the code in the actual Flash applet. Now, if you take into account that Flash's code is highly aimed and geared towards Windows (meaning that the Flash version running on your N900 is probably as bad, poorly engineered and buggy as the one that runs on OSX), you end up with a very, very vast problem.

I don't like Flash, if that wasn't apparent up to now. It's a proprietary piece of **** that has become a standard on the web, not because of its qualities, not because of its strengths, but because it was there. Flash is a disease, born to power small banners, and has been abused to become a full framework used in major websites for all the wrong reason. Shiny, curvy and sexy are no reasons to become a standard.

Essentially, Flash is the only de facto web standard that is proprietary. Why is it the de facto standard? Because of its ubiquity. Flash is used to deliver video on the web, hence, video on the web is 100% controlled by Adobe. No other standard on the web works like this. Be it HTML, CSS, Javascript, there are a number of implementations, very well written standards and RFCs, that take into account the different requirements and objections that the main players of the web had.

The web is inherently Open Source, yet Flash is hindering that, in the worst possible way.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Publishers use Flash for web video because Flash is installed on such a high percentage of clients; clients support Flash because so many publishers use Flash for web video. Apple, with the iPhone -- and now the iPad --, is solving the chicken and egg problem. For the first time ever, there is a large and growing audience of demographically desirable users who don’t have Flash installed. If you want to show video to iPhone users, you need to use H.264.

Apple isn’t trying to replace Flash with its own proprietary thing. They’re replacing it with H.264 and HTML5. This is good for everyone but Adobe.

Flash isn't exclusively used for video, sure, but there is no way around it: People don't complain they don't have flash because of the games, most flash games would run like pigs on mobile devices anyway. If you want something to run fast, just run it natively. HTML5 is that nativity that is required.

I’m not arguing that Apple’s apparent executive-level antipathy toward Flash is about anything other than Apple’s own interests. (I do think, though, that Apple’s WebKit team is genuinely idealistic about helping the web as a whole.)

But while Apple may be acting spitefully, they’re not spiting themselves. The iPhone’s lack of Flash has not hurt it one bit. Perhaps that will change in the future, if Flash someday proves popular on other mobile platforms, but don’t hold your breath.

So again, think about what Operating System you're supporting by being on this forum. Think about how hard we are trying to have a system that is Open, and that can be used by anyone, to do anything.

Flash is owned and controlled by Adobe.

'nuff said.