I am just am user and can't criticize a technology I'm not smart enough to evaluate... but in my ingenuousness I prefer to have a chance to enjoy Flash if I want than being protected by it.

@Laughing Man: lol, he doesn't want to make a point. All he wants to do is to make money by being the lesser evil (in that particular case). Btw, I wonder if google's theora push can make it an alternative in html5's video implementation?

Personally, I'd feel the web would be more neutral if I don't need to install specific 3rd party proprietary plugin to enjoy contents from it. Especially for something as prevalent as video streaming. On the other hand, sure, I guess you can rationalize that Adobe has done their homework and positioned themselves smartly to enjoy such monopoly now.

It's more that Jobs' argument isn't as strong when what he's arguing for is seen as substituting one monopoly (Flash) for another (H264). Especially since Flash is already positioned in most if not all browsers, while the future (HTML5) is already causing divides. Like Wikipedia and Firefox refusing to license H264.

I think everyone could get behind Jobs' argument if he embraced a standard codec that everyone could use without having to pay licensing fees. Imagine how much faster we would be moving from Flash to HTML5 then.

A sample - HTML5 browser game. How does it run for you?

http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/demo/game-tlol.html

@LM: Yeah. But no one would mistake him as an opensource champion. I wonder if he has made any arguments in favor of (specifically) opensource in the past? All I can remember is his DRM open letter against the music industry which was pro-consumer.

I don't know enough about the process of html standards creation and all the subtle elements considered for it to comment about the selection of h.264. I'd imagine it's a broad enough standard that there would be sufficient representation from the OSS side and smaller players which would be precluded from the h.264 selection, that if there had been a better alternative (at the time) than h.264, we'd already have a giant petition or some such against it.

Bottom line is that Apple can't compete on hardware. They want to make their computers and phones super thin and still expect them to run well. I own 3 macbook pros. They all overheat and have had major hardware problems. My 18.4" Core i7 Toshiba doesn't get hot because it's thick enough to have good fans and since I bought it 6 months ago, I've never had any hardware problems.

I had an iPhone before my N900. Apple sees Adobe as competition in the casual gaming market. There are tons of freely playable online games that my kids play on sites like agame.com. On the iPhone there's an app for each of those games and Apple gets a cut from it's sales.

Hover mode is certainly not perfect. But it DOES allow me to do things I couldn't on my iphone.
Flash on n900 is also far from perfect. But it DOES allow me to do things on some sites which is impossible on the iphone.

If these two features degraded my normal web experience in any way then sure. I'd agree with steve. They should be removed. But they don't. Flash can be blocked with a simple download(I'll admit there should be an option for it). Hover mode is just there. If you never use it you won't even know it's there.
This is the basic flaw in steve jobs arguments. Even though he may be right about flash. He's wrong about the big picture.

The problem with h.264 is the big licensing threat hanging over it.

Was Ogg/Theora a sane option during that selection process? I wonder why it wasn't seleccted?

Well, the title screen is nice enough, I suppose, but "PRESS A TO START" seems to be a lie.