http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
Adobe was also a big proponent of SVG standard (for vectorial graphics) with their very own plugin, until they purchased Macromedia.
Because Macromedia did a incredible, really great job pushing their plugin into the vast majority of browsers (google flash plugin penetration ~ 99%). They accomplished that by making a tool that web developers wanted and people liked, with a smaller plugin and better than any other company: fast animations (remember the pain of making gif89a or a java applet?), mp3 sounds! (remember midi, wav, au, aiff or the BGSOUND tag?), typography, any font! (not just Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Times or Georgia), vector graphics that downloads and renders fast (is there any website using SVG now?), streaming video embeded into the html page (better than real player, quicktime or windows media, because it works almost for everybody, except the iPhone users, except when watching YouTube), microphone and webcam support, and now (with flash 10) they are putting 3d inside their plugin (before anyone could say OpenGL ES).
In an ideal world we would have solid standards, but in this world we have the W3C, and the abandoned XHTML2 or CSS3, unimplemented by the browsers CSS2, SVG, SMIL, and so on...
That is why we have got the propietary Futuresplash-Macromedia-Adobe Flash leading the web to its full potencial, in place of the W3C, or Sun's Java applets, Microsoft's ActiveX or Silverlight, Adobe PDF+scripts, Google nativeclient... but Macromedia did better.
Never mind the fact that you will have to go forward about 10 years before most browsers support HTML5 in it's entirety.
Then special casing is not ideal and i'm fairly sure flash does get indexed these days.
Its apparent you don't want it, but does the iPhone need Flash? I don't know - i don't have one, but i would think its only a matter of time.