Now it seems popular amongst some here to dismiss Gruber as an Apple fanboy or simply to disagree with him simply because he likes Apple and they don't but that's a ludicrous position. The only question should be: do his questions have merit?

IMHO they clearly do.

The thing that absolutely floors me about this is that it prolongs the reliance on Flash, which as Gruber correctly points out, was one of the major factors behind the <video> tag in HTML5 (to get away from requiring proprietary plugins).

For the foreseeable future, the smart (and IMHO the only) thing for sites to do is support H.264. To not do so is to potentially alienate hundreds of millions of users, being those using the iDevices (not the least of which is the iPod Touch). Sites may choose to dual-encode in WebM but why would you? Double the processing time and double the storage, for what? A video you can play without using a Flash wrapper?

People keep pointing to the GIF precedent. That is tantalizingly similar but it suffers from the same kind of fallacies as comparisons of iOS vs Android to Apple vs Microsoft (Windows) do: it ignores the fact that the times they have a-changed.

Consider: I watch an awful lot of video on my iPad. Hardly any of it is in H.264 format. The solution? A $3-4 app called Air Video that transcodes to H.264 on the fly.

With the cheapness and abundance of computing power now, let alone 10+ years from now (which is when the tail end of the H.264 patents are and thus when the GIF-like profiteering scenario would presumably come to fruition), why do I care what format anything is in?

If MPEG-LA decided to increase the cost of an H.264 license by 10x for a site like Youtube I guarantee you that Google could re-encode every video on Youtube in somewhat reasonable time. And that's today.

H.264 is already (perpetually) free for the end user so the it's only the content providers who really matter in this equation.

Now I'm not arguing we should go completely in with H.264 and to hell with everything else. I'm all for providing users and sites with choice and for that reason, I fully support WebM.

What I don't support is removing the choice of H.264 from users or forcing them to keep using a closed and proprietary plugin (Flash obviously) to watch them.

The fact that Chrome bundles Flash is already almost enough reason for me to stop using it. Flash blocker extensions are suboptimal (eg tricks like Flash overlays on sites that kick off all the Flash). Completely uninstalling it is not an option (every page asks you "You are missing plugins, would you like to install them?").

For me this move may just mean I switch back to Firefox.

Lastly, I don't read this as an anti-Apple move at all. It's certainly political but (IMHO) not aimed at Apple specifically. It's more about the philosophy of an open Web. I fully support that. I simply question the wisdom of forcing subpar choices on end users to that end.

Also, some here like to point at Apple and ask "how is this different to Apple not supporting Flash?"

That one's easy: It was 3 years after the iPhone's release before Adobe had a full version of Flash that ran on ANY mobile platform (being Android ultimately). If you accept the assertion that Android Flash is sufficient (and that is debatable) why exactly is Apple being blamed for Adobe failing to deliver any kind of sufficient technical solution?

If you want to point the finger at anyone point it at Adobe. If they'd been serious they would've jailbroken various iDevices and demoed an iOS version of Flash years ago to make their point, had they had such a thing. The fact that either they didn't or they chose not to demonstrate it, whichever way it goes, means they dropped the ball.

Does Apple want Flash? Now? Clearly not and at this point it probably doesn't matter what Adobe does but years ago? Who knows? But criticizing someone for not shipping a nonexistent product is crazy.