I don't disagree that Flash has the potential to create issues.

The argument just suffers from the fallacy of composition. The standoff motif is getting old. We're talking about software, not cold war against another country.

Apple doesn't want you to notice Steve behind the curtain. With Adobe we tend to pick and choose what we agree with and ignore the points that don't support our bias.

In what way is saying "Flash has problems, therefore putting Flash on your platform will expose it to those problems" a fallacy of composition? I don't see it at all. It's not wrongly attributing an attribute of one small part of Flash to the whole. Or are you saying the fallacy is somewhere else?

In this respect, I am not arguing for or against Flash on any device. Just that the argument against it is just as flawed as the argument for it.

But you don't appear to have pointed out any specific flaws in the argument against it. So you're not making an argument, just an unsupported assertion.

All I am saying is that Steve Jobs isn't putting all the facts on the table as they are. He is feeding the anti-Flash gang mob with half-truths.

To say Flash is proprietary, possibly poorly executed format is a fair thing to say. To say it is completely without merit and has no place is a fallacy. HTML5 video is widely supported today. Flash might be a delivery vehicle for another unrealized idea tomorrow.

And the "death to the plugin arch" circle-jerk logic is almost intolerable. Only create within the confines of the parent layer's imaginative capacity? Sounds more closed than SWF.

kevinh said it best: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305322

Support to my assertions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304353

I have no issue with him shutting out something that really sucks today at the cost of potentially missing out on something awesome to do with it tomorrow. The awesome scenario just doesn't seem likely to come to pass. If tomorrow there's a completely great thing on the web that can only be done with flash, then I think Jobs is pragmatic enough to reevaluate.

But the fact that the main use for Flash on the web these days, beside video and unusable websites, are animated flash ads that use up 40% of my much more powerful Macbook Pro's CPU time means I'm in no hurry to have flash on the phone, openness dogma be damned. When Jobs limits my general purpose computers, I'll be angry, but until then, I'm glad he's making the tough design decisions instead of just letting the device be a free for all.

> But the fact that the main use for Flash on the web these days, beside video and unusable websites, are animated flash ads that use up 40% of my much more powerful Macbook Pro's CPU time means I'm in no hurry to have flash on the phone

In my opinion, this is moot point. Annoying ads aren't going to be limited to Flash. HTML5 ads aren't going to be more fun.

I was talking mostly about the CPU utilization, not just the annoyance factor. I would hope that the HTML5 equivalent would be less power-hungry.

What flash ads? Just use AdBlock.

My point was that that is one of the main uses of Flash, and that an extremely simple/common flash implementation is enough to burn a huge number of CPU cycles for no benefit.

No user benefit. But there's nothing stopping advertisers from making crappy HTML5 canvas ads, and those are guaranteed to burn even more of your CPU cycles. So I call shenanigans on that argument.

Apple controls the iPhone's HTML5 renderer and feels much more confident in its performance. "There's nothing stopping advertisers from making crappy canvas ads" is not the same thing as "canvas ads will suck at least as much power on average as Flash ads."

They were separate points. Canvas is inherently more computationally expensive than Flash at this stage of the technology. As canvas advances, so does flash -- unless Flash dies off completely, Canvas ads will always suck more CPU cycles than Flash ads.

"unless Flash dies off completely, Canvas ads will always suck more CPU cycles than Flash ads."

Who says they'll progress at the same rate? That's ridiculous. Flash is at least 10 years old and has been in extremely heavy use, so it's likely plateaued in terms of performance on most platforms. Canvas (and the rendering engines for it) are very new by comparison.