Once again, The Register (Steve Jobs Flash Rant Put To Rest) and others have bravely decried the Evil of Apple’s stance against Flash.
The performance of Flash 10.1 which is (a) beta software and (b) was unreleased when Steve Jobs ranted about Flash being buggy, full of security holes, and a CPU hog has demonstrated that Jobs was totally wrong. As a couple of unbiased and totally scientific tests by people with a no vested interest in Flash whatsoever (oops, that link is to “unscientific” tests by an Adobe employee… my bad) demonstrate, Flash is generally no worse at playing low quality H264 video than HTML5 is at playing high quality H264 video (although, if you read the results, actually Safari/HTML5 crushes Flash like a bug on the Mac — although it looks like hardware acceleration would be a big win), and it’s not a CPU hog compared to similar completely pointless animations done with JavaScript. No word on the bugs or security holes.
So, basically, when Steve Jobs complained about Flash’s performance, he should have considered that future versions of Flash might (finally) be fixed and thus prove him completely wrong.
Meanwhile, going back to the business case for Flash, the only thing Flash is better than nothing for (on the web) is casual games. But, if you’re a casual game developer you can publish your game as standalone for the iPhone using Flash CS5. So, again, exactly what do we need Flash — as in the Flash plugin — on the iPhone (or anything else) for? Does having a browser page full of GIF animations around it really enhance our gaming experience?