The only place where Flash works very decent is on Windows with IE. It kind of bogs down on even bigger power desktops and laptops. It absolutely blows on OS X for whatever reason.
That said the point of Flash on Android is not to have guaranteed high performance, fluent apps that work like native ones. That's an impossible goal - for one, Adobe cannot control what kind of Flash/AS code all of the developers out on the web will write.
And secondly on my Xoom with 3.1 - Flash works great enough - no stutter or crashes. Does the job. So as more decent hardware comes out and they optimize Flash even more it will become better.
This whole cult like insanity people have created for and against Flash is mind blowing - it's there you can use it if you want, don't if you don't. No one is forcing anything down your throats folks. For me I will take reasonably working Flash instead of not working at all.
Oh and before you beat up the HTML5 drum - it's not there yet and it's not the absolute reality of the web today.
I think what people take issue with (at least its what I take issue with) is that Adobe is trying to pretend its an open standard of the web, that helps push the web forward when in reality it does the contrary. For starters, its not an open standard, its an executable program (or plugin). It isn't a standard left up to be implemented by whoever is interested, its controlled by the one and only master implementation by Adobe. A lot of websites like to depend on Flash in some way or the other, be it for ads, video, or some functionality, and more often than not it makes the experience unpleasant.
On the other hand HTML5 is an open standard and thats all it is. Its basically an agreement of what the technology takes as input, and puts out as output. If you want to implement the technology, by all means, go ahead. If group A implements it better than group B, then people have the choice of using the group A technology. Group B will then have to improve their implementation if they are interested in staying competitive, and we all win. That to me is key, the option of using a standard, implemented by different people to make it strive, not a binary distributed and leaving you up to the whim of the company behind it.
FYI: You spoke of windows and Mac OS X, but didn't mention Linux (probably because you haven't tried it, the same way I haven't tried it in Mac OS X.) Flash absolutely blows in Linux as well. I'm not talking just on the gnash and open source flash players, I mean the Adobe closed source build. It stutters, the keyboard input detection is abysmal, it leaks memory all the time, and crashes eventually from all the memory leaks.
Flash is ridiculous on OS X. It leaks memory like a sieve - I once left a few tabs open overnight with Flash ads and your various bits of Flash-based internet detritus, and by the time I woke up my machine was thrashing madly until I manually killed Flash. Its performance is also piss poor even when it isn't leaking your RAM all over the floor.
Not to mention it breaks a lot of fundamental browser interactivity - want something to render on top of your Flash applet? FUCK YOU YOU CAN'T.
Scrolling happily along with your mousewheel on a page, then you hit a Flash applet. While your cursor is over the applet, your scroll wheel stops working. Why? God knows, because Adobe hates us and Flash is the greatest bit of trolling ever.
These aren't new issues - these have been around since the very first days of Flash. Adobe simply has no interest in bringing usability up to the standards of the 21st century.
Nor security for that matter - one of my main objections to Flash is that it conveniently circumvents all of the nice security features your browser has painstakingly built into your experience. Incognito mode? Flash won't respect it. Don't like cookies? Well, screw you, Flash will keep its own equivalent anyways. Nice, sandboxed JavaScript runtime? Well, Flash does its own thing (and has its own bugs and security holes... many, many security holes)...
I trust Google, Mozilla, et al to do a reasonably good job protecting me online. I do not trust Adobe - both due to their lack of regard for basic product quality (both stability and usability), as well as their poor security track record of having more holes than a beehive.
If third parties could actually implement a runtime (one that, say, wouldn't suck) then maybe Flash would be a good idea. At least there would be a way to work around a single vendor's supremely shitty implementation.
I don't deny the need and desire for a highly interactive technology like what Flash wants to be (and sometimes is)... but this is not the answer.
Still waiting, all this time later. The killed the beta some time ago that ran on Linux. It seems there's some hard problem they're unable to solve, or just don't care.
There are some types of apps that are in demand and flash is well equipped to build. Users don't care about any of this stuff. They just want something that works and is useful or fun. It doesn't have to be an arch philosophical issue. When people like you rant about flash, it just demonstrates you've never built the sort of app that flash excels at. Sure, flash has its problems, but there are some tasks that javascript simply can't do, or can't do nearly as well as flash. Flash has done some things wrong, but it's also done a lot of things right and helped pushed the web forward. Get off your soapbox!
The issue here isn't that Flash is useless. Of course it is useful for some apps, especially the ones that are dealing with audio/video streams.
The issue here is that Flash got used in all the wrong places. Lots and lots of websites use it for all the wrong reasons, and while you can blame the websites developers for that, the fact of the matter is that Flash scripts are everywhere and regular users don't even notice it.
Because of that, on Android at least your browser experience gets a lot worse -- browser is noticeably slower and it bleeds your battery life like crazy. And users will just blame their phones.
The worst thing about all this - besides the fact that Adobe couldn't pull their shit together to create a version truly optimized for mobiles - because Flash is not an open-standard like HTML5, the others cannot fix it for them. It's not like Google can come up with a new VM (like they did with Chrome), or like how Apple came up with a kick-ass rendering engine like WebKit, that eventually became the norm for mobiles - they can't do that.
That's why standards are better and that's why Flash needs to go and be replaced by web standards. If Flash sucks, nobody but Adobe can improve it and judging by their history Adobe is really week in that department.
And of course, as I said, at the same time Flash is useful for some apps - of course it is, ActiveX was useful too.
I don't think that's true. Find an ordinary user who likes Flash intros on websites, or who likes attention-seeking Flash ads disturbing them while reading an article.
The only thing that Flash is used for that real people (as opposed to marketing twerps) actually like is cheesy little games, and they can be done perfectly well without Flash these days.
Simply not true. Gmail calling is not possibly in HTML/js.
There are a lot of cool websites that use Flash for more than games and video these days. Qwiki won TechCrunch Disrupt last year. Beatlab is a super cool music creation app.
And Flash will likely always be the standard for DRM Video on the web. Being an open standard, HTML5 can never include DRM.
I see Flash's place is as a stopgap for features that haven't been standardized/implemented yet. It does those very well.
Gmail calling uses Google's own plugin, not Flash. And they just open sourced it and intend for browser makers to integrate it into their browsers. Hopefully it will be possible to do video calling in HTML soon.
From a desktop perspective, video streaming is still a marginally more pleasant experience in Flash than in HTML5 equivalents (random position seeking, full screen controls, quality, etc). It may full well be an individual site's deficient/immature HTML5 implementations, I've never been curious enough to investigate in-depth, but I also have yet to experience a better experience in HTML5 that would create an incentive to seek out those implementations over a Flash version if Flash is presented as the default choice.
Flash file uploaders also tend to be more mature and a little smoother to use in general. I'm sure HTML5 will surpass it soon enough, but at present, it's a use of Flash that I don't mind.
Additionally, I somewhat dread the day when annoying and/or malicious advertising makes the switch. At present, blocking Flash is a stupid simple task, a standards based annoyance has the potential to be much harder to avoid.
Flash specs are open sans the Sorenson codec which I don't think is that relevant - so anyone in theory could implement Flash without paying royalties.
But that's besides the point as no one will actually do it effectively - may be the spec is insane and it is impossible to make the pig fly.
But the real failure is not of Flash/Adobe - they went out and _did_ something to make the web richer and provide people with a tool to do what they want when progress on rich, dynamic, more capable standardized Web was painfully slow. The failure is of the Web Standards - I may be slightly off base but till this date HTML5 can't do half of what Flash is capable of doing. The only other alternative is Silverlight - not exactly better as it is less open and ubiquitous than Flash is.
[ On Linux : Using since '96 - But recently gave up on Linux as the Desktop. The latest I tried Flash on Fedora, it was screwed up because Flash gets memcpy wrong - overlapping - and some jerks decided to be uptight about it and fixed memcpy to break Flash. They may have their reasons and justifications but I no longer want to deal with that stuff anymore. Still contribute non-trivial patches to the kernel and manage a bunch of RHEL boxes - so still do Linux but just not on the Desktop.]
First, before May 1, 2008 the official specs for the swf format couldn't be used to create alternative implementations. If you read them, you were tainted. Even after, the spec didn't contain essential info like details about the RTMP protocol.
Second, it took an awful lot of time for Adobe to release specs, and the specs aren't really useful since devs from Gnash and SwfDec did a better job by reverse engineering, which is still legal.
And it can't help when Adobe is suing Wowza (as in, right now) or when it pulls rtmpdump from SourceForge with a DMCA request (May 26, 2009).
Third - open, as in public specs, doesn't mean it's a standard. It would be a standard if you were allowed not only to create an alternative implementation (debatable if you can) but if you were able to improve on it, improvements which may also be accepted in the standard.
And a real open standard requires a standards body, not a company that is willing to sue using patents whenever they feel like they aren't in control anymore.
If anything, the "opening" of those specs means absolutely nothing. Flash is still as closed as it was prior to May 2008. The only difference between now and then is the maturing of projects like Red5, but such projects are in a gray legal area. And THE alternatives to the official Flash client are still mostly unusable.
Go ask the Gnash or SwfDec developers about the openness of Flash.
You are only half right. Flash is not an open standard.
Standards are means to an end, which is cross platform applications so I don't have to write the same thing multiple times over. If Flash was done well and it was cross platform, then it wouldn't be a problem for me.
* Yes, Flash sucks. But there are certain things for which nothing is better.
That's a great one line summary I will remember to throw out and get back to work the next time Flash sucks conversation comes up (will be pretty soon I'm sure :)
Where latest everything == OS version 3.1 and Flash version 10.3? In that case something else may be going on - can't get it to suck enough to bother me on my 3G Xoom.
I'm surprised that there isn't more talk about Flash efficiency and its impact on global energy consumption and the environment. My desktop CPU burns an extra 50 watts when it is pegged at 100% (and in a typical day, Flash is the only thing that pegs my CPU for a prolonged period of time). Multiply that by hundreds of millions of computers running Flash -- many whose owners don't realize their CPUs are at 100% -- and it adds up to potentially millions of extra pounds of CO2 emissions every day.
Chrome, block all plug-ins by default. You'll never see a flash ad again, but instead a big gray box in it's place. Should you need to activate flash to watch a video on a web page then you can just click the gray box and it will load the plug-in. Works great for me.
This is a really poorly written, fanboyish article - not saying anything about whether or not flash is good, but do we really need articles like this one on HN?
"Watch the smug get slapped right off of Narayen’s face after he laughably tries to claim that contrary to Steve Jobs’s argument that Flash is a dead technology, it’s currently running on 130 million Android devices."
Agreed. Definitely did not see what the author was talking about there, which leads me to suspect he started watching the video with a strong bias in mind.
I clicked through hoping for some technical content about how Flash is doing on mobile platforms. I got an analysis of a facial reaction in an interview.
That's pretty disappointing. So here I am in the HN comment thread hoping someone will say something interesting and technical.
The article was written by CultofMac. They have a strong self interest in exaggerating any situation relating to Apple in order to attract more readers. It's hard to find honest boring news nowadays.
I think by far the biggest problem Adobe has to deal with is that there are so many inexperienced software developers who have taken up writing Flash applications. These new developers' lack of knowledge is what causes these applications to have poor performance, not any particular inefficiencies in the Flash platform itself.
It probably stems from the fact that the development studio is designed more for artists than developers, allowing artists to toy with adding functionality to their creations but not really giving them the years of training it requires to understand performance implications.
Adobe can't really make this claim, even though they are fully aware of it, because it is never good to badmouth your customers. So they are left with taking the heat for them instead.
Contrast this to the native Android or iOS development environments which cater to experienced software developers.
When it comes to ActionScript the problem isn't so much creatives trying to write code (they'll do stuff in the score) but more self taught programmers who may not be that experienced. Although you could level the same charge at other languages like PHP that attract production people who are looking to do more cut-and-paste than anything else. Another issue is that Flash projects can be very client driven, and more often than not advertising clients don't always grok tech issues.
Although I feel that Adobe has to take some credit for the structure and evolution of Flash. Adobe has always been more about adding 50 average features to sell a software suite than to focus on better/faster/stable. Unlike Microsoft who owns the OS or Apple who makes hardware their core business is selling new tools, so there is no "bigger picture". The result is bloatware.
Most Adobe software is bloated (Creative Suite and Acrobat, in particular), but I don't think it is fair to call Flash bloated. The Macromedia Flash dev team has always been very conscious about Flash's download size, allocating code size budgets for new features.
Here are the historical file sizes of the Flash Player installer (compressed .exe for Windows ActiveX Control):
* Flash Player 2 (1997) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 3 (1998) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 4 (1999) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 5 (2000) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 6 (2002) = 0.5 MB ***
* Flash Player 7 (2003) = 0.6 MB ***
* Flash Player 8 (2005) = 0.8 MB ****
* Flash Player 9 (2006) = 1.5 MB ******** (first Flash release after Adobe acquired Macromedia)
* Flash Player 10 (2008) = 1.9 MB **********
* Flash Player 10.1 (2010) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.2 (2011) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.3 (2011) = 2.9 MB ***************
By bloated I mean interface complexity rather than physical size. Once upon a time Adobe really understood interface design, but these days their apps feel like a total mess to me. The point of every upgrade seems to be to add a stray feature and move some buttons around. And then they have to make programs like bridge that talk to other programs.
And then the programs keep asking to be updated every five minutes like a kitty that's hungry. In fact I'm looking at my CS3 icons vs my CS5 icons in my dock and even the new icons looked bloated. In fact even the ordering process of upgrading CS is bloated —- it was as if I had to read a manual to figure what the differences were and what the upgrade cost. And I say this as someone who has used their software since Photoshop 1.0 and grew up in PageMaker (which to be fair was Aldus).
And did I mention that it took me longer to install the CS suite than to upgrade to Windows 7??? And I didn't even install all every package (and it still put code from some of those programs on my harddrive).
Good to point this out... Flash works because the desktop platform has such a huge excess of computing resource relative to the needs of the applications built in Flash that some inefficiency in the name of an easier developer experience is no problem. On mobile phones, where you're almost always pushing the envelope in terms of available memory and CPU cycles if you want to do anything interesting, this suddenly becomes a huge problem.
This argument has been played to death, and Adobe never seem to let it go. The fact is, Apple owes Adobe nothing, and not including Flash was never a dig at Adobe as a company, but a choice that Apple made about Flash as a software package. Adobe seem to have taken it super personally, but the truth is that Flash on mobile devices just doesn't work in it's current form (speed and usability issues). Steve has said multiple times that the door isn't closed on Flash, they just need Adobe to prove it will perform like Apple expects.
Not exactly. Apple changed their developer agreement such that programs that weren't developed using the iOS SDK weren't allowed on the App Store. They reversed the decision only later on, and now you can develop on Adobe AIR and have the LLVM-derived compiler (irony?) output code for iOS.
Truly. We should disable JavaScript as well. Who knows what AJAX vulnerabilities might be in mobile Safari? Apple can't vet them all for malware. On that token, Apple can't vet all websites to make sure that their content doesn't misrepresent Apple as a company. They should probably just trash Mobile Safari altogether.
The security model for AJAX is open, well-documented, and peer-reviewed. Safari implements the same-origin policy, various CSRF-mitigation standards, and tends to be updated quickly once exploits are found.
I didn't say that Apple should or shouldn't do anything. Just that apps from the App Store are potentially safer than things in-browser. Of course JavaScript apps pose similar risks, but as Apple controls the JS engine (unlike the Flash runtime) they feel safer that way.
They took it very seriously, as well they should. It was clear that mobile, even then, was going to become so big as to start directing change on the desktop. If Flash is left out of mobile, Adobe's relevance is seriously threatened.
That said, I think the 'personal' nature of their response is just posturing. They're taking a victim stance to stir up sympathy because, well, they can. The press will respond to that story far more readily than a straight technological disagreement. And boy have they. It's confusing the issue long enough for Adobe to adapt their authoring tools to kick out competent HTML5, which will protect their revenue stream in either case.
Agreed. Also don't forget that no one really made much noise about the lack of Flash on iPhones. It wasn't until iPads also had no Flash that Adobe could more clearly see the writing on the wall and started making a lot of noise.
What's more, Adobe would never have put this much effort into making Flash suck less on mobile platforms if Apple had decided that shitty Flash was better than no Flash and went ahead and shipped it with iOS.
The actual quote from Mossberg is much more polite than the submission title would suggest: "I have yet to test a single [Android phone] where Flash works really well. I’m sorry. They struggle on those Android devices."
Why do I suspect Mossberg's statement could be reduced to?
I have yet to test a single [Android phone]
Ok, cheap shot, but I really think he's not actually tried it on high end phones with reasonable flash apps that are designed for mobile use. Yes, if you go to cnn.com which fully expects to be running on a desktop it stutters. It stutters on some desktop computers too. But go to the mobile games sites that specialize in Flash games for phones - and many of them are great.
No. You're mixing in a different definition of "platform" here to include hardware profile. A flash app designed to run well on one mobile device will probably run well on other mobile devices with little or no modification. On the other hand a flash app designed to run well on a desktop probably is not going to run well on mobile hardware. But then probably neither will any app built on any technology that was designed to make use of desktop level hardware.
Well, it's interesting to see my comment sink down to negative territory. Here's the exact quote from Narayen in the linked article:
> The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible
He says "devices", clearly indicating that he is arguing the value proposition is to deploy across multiple phone (or mobile device) platforms, not some kind of write-once-run-anywhere proposition that works across desktop and mobile.
I hear that argument a lot, but I've never found myself where a kludge of a technology really saved the day. I lump it with the web browser on the Kindle where the idea of having it available is much more interesting then even the desert island use of the tech.
That's because it's not a "kludge of a technology". It works most of the time, doesn't some times, and has bad problems (locking up your browser, crashing, etc.) on the minority of times. A lot of anti-Flash people, for whatever reason, translate the bad occurrences as "blows" or some other hyperbole.
You know what doesn't suck? Having the option to run it when I want. I don't use it often but there have been several instances where I was able to access web content that iOS users could not.
Personally, I'd rather have the vendors kill off Flash, forcing the web to switch to alternatives, resulting in an environment where I never need (or want) to use Flash.
I'm even willing to suffer slightly for this in the meantime -- even if that means you can access Flash (poorly) on an Android device, and I can't. Apple's position has already resulted in a fairly dramatic decrease in the number of flash-only websites, and I won't cry if I see it disappear entirely.
The problem with this notion is that everyone is assuming that HTML5 + Javascript is going to be somehow drastically better than flash when it matures.
I have not seen any technical arguments as for why this would be. I imagine that when all the inexperienced flash programmers move over to HTML5, we will end up with even slower HTML5 based animated ads and an even more fragmented browsing experience due to the lack of standards for video and audio. Worse, since these technologies can be more thoroughly integrated into websites, it will be far harder to block them.
>The problem with this notion is that everyone is assuming that HTML5 + Javascript is going to be somehow drastically better than flash when it matures.
> I have not seen any technical arguments as for why this would be.
That's because you're looking for a technical reason when the real reason lies in strategic interests and manpower concerns.
If I'm Apple or HP or FoobarCorp, and I'm readying the brand new iWidget or TouchFob or FooPad, running my OS and browser, and relying on Flash for rich web content, if there are performance or stability issues, I have to punt them to Adobe and wait in line behind Flash for Windows, Flash for OS X, Flash for Android, and whatever other priorities Adobe has in front of me before they allocate manpower to my problems.
But if rich web content is built in HTML5 + JS then I can send my engineers into our Webkit fork/Gecko engine/IE-wrapper/telnet-front-end to make things work right on our bizarro CPU or GPU or whatever it is that Adobe would have done a piss-poor job of optimizing for.
Relying on a single choke point to deliver good performance to everyone has failed miserably. Independent, self-interested groups are more likely to do a better job of each optimizing HTML5 performance best for their own needs.
Agreed, not to mention that honestly I don't have a big problem with it. I have it load on demand and my device is old now, a Nexus One. I load and play flash games regulairly without issue. I keep hearing that Flash sucks on Android but I guess I have the one and only device where it works.
I admit it does bog on occasion but I attribute that mostly to flash apps that were designed on and for desktop PC power. I also have run HTML 5 sites that bring my desktop computer and browser to its knees but I don't scream "HTML 5 sucks!" Perhaps my experience is unique.
The tricky thing is that not having it at all doesn't suck, either. We've been seeing this same argument come and go for years now and the practical reality is that nobody cares that much either way. Flash has turned out to be neither a crippling omission for iOS or a giant coup for Android.
You know, as much as I don't like Apple, this time I've got to hand it to them as they were right -- I have an Android and I love it, but the browser plugins are disabled (since Samsung thought it would be a good idea for Flash to be part of the Firmware, and I can't uninstall it).
Flash makes your browser unusable, because it consumes a lot of battery and makes browsing slower. And it's doing this without you even noticing, since many websites include either crappy Flash commercials or at least some .swf that sets Flash cookies for better tracking.
The sad part is that the first 2 days I blamed my phone for the piss-poor battery life, but after I disabled Flash and uninstalled Skype my phone's battery now lasts for 3 days instead of 6 hours and the browser runs smoothly.
I've had good experiences with flash on my Galaxy S, mainly flash streaming, I don't play flash games. I've used it on a number of occasions to watch streams of cricket matches.
Good for Uncle Walt. There aren't enough reporters out there who call CEOs out on the truth of his comments. Right or wrong, it's more interesting for Walt to say his view on this as someone who looks at a _lot_ of Android phones than just let that statement pass unchallenged.
It's clearly not about which one runs better, has the better development tools, or best support across browsers and operating systems. It's about Flash being (semi)closed, requiring a plugin, and being owned by Adobe.
I agree, but sadly the prevailing notion held by the majority of developers and the public seems to be that HTML5/JS is somehow significantly better than Flash in terms of technology. In this sense, Apple's deceptive marketing strategy has been a success.
Is it deceptive? I remember iterating through minor versions of Flash just to get Adobe Connect (a product of the very same company, just to emphase) to run without crashing on OS X. Yes, Flash on OS X is horrible mess, even more on Linux.
I vastly improved my browsing experience on OS X by actually following Grubers advice and only have one Browser with Flash enabled (Chrome). And even there, it is the single point of crashes(tm).
In practice Adobe has had very poor security response. Claiming that all technologies are equally vulnerable to security concerns is like comparing qmail and Adobe Reader and saying the same thing.
I have an Android phone and I have never had any problems with Flash. And I am far from a Flash cheerleader. It seems that most of the Flash hatred comes from Linux and Mac users. If it sucks on their platforms then I can truly understand that. Even on Windows it could be a lot better. But it is not an evil technology. Just poorly implemented at times.
Every time the argument comes up I feel as if there is a section of people trying to convince others that Adobe is the devil. Flash has its place on the web until something comes along that can properly replace it. HTML5/CSS3 is just not there yet but it soon will be.
I believe the Android Flash plugin uses native code. You aren't forced to run on Dalvik on Android - Google released a Native Development Kit that includes GCC.
Flash can't run natively "on webkit." Flash file contains bytecode, which has to be either fully interpreted or JIT-ed. It has to be done on mobiles too. The interpreter or JIT-er has to be native. Writing native JIT-ers is hard, to have a native interpreter you can write it in C and recompile it for every platform but it will be significantly slower. In short, it's not easy to make the Flash fast on a new CPU. And no, Webkit is not a CPU.
All Android apps are Java apps. The Android Browser is a thin Java app that uses JNI to load WebKit (which is native code). WebKit then loads the Flash native (which is also native code). Flash is running as native code, JIT'ing ActionScript, and (as necessary) calling back into Dalvik APIs using JNI.
Frankly, I'm tired of the whining about Flash and the (largely Apple-hating) enablers and apologists for Adobe's incompetence.
Fact is, all Adobe had to do to "win" this PR war was jailbreak and iPhone, developer a version of Flash for it and then show it off to anyone and everyone who wants to see what a great experience it can be.
Instead, Adobe would rather just lie back and say "there's no point in trying", which is an obnoxious mix of laziness, incompetence and arrogance.
What's worse is the number of people who have bought into their BS.
Does Apple want Flash on iOS? Probably not. But with good reason. And who really cares? Producing a compelling Flash experience on mobile (something that STILL doesn't exist, even on Android) would've gone a long way to forcing their hand.
That said the point of Flash on Android is not to have guaranteed high performance, fluent apps that work like native ones. That's an impossible goal - for one, Adobe cannot control what kind of Flash/AS code all of the developers out on the web will write.
And secondly on my Xoom with 3.1 - Flash works great enough - no stutter or crashes. Does the job. So as more decent hardware comes out and they optimize Flash even more it will become better.
This whole cult like insanity people have created for and against Flash is mind blowing - it's there you can use it if you want, don't if you don't. No one is forcing anything down your throats folks. For me I will take reasonably working Flash instead of not working at all.
Oh and before you beat up the HTML5 drum - it's not there yet and it's not the absolute reality of the web today.