I am not going to say much on this issue, since a great deal has been said already, and by some very eloquent people, but I did want to make some points that haven't been made clearly by the people on the anti-flash bandwagon.

The point about standards

Standards a good thing, I find it hard to believe that today there are developers who work on the web who don't agree with this. Standards by necessity must be open, and that is the main rub I have with Flash. Make the flash format and player a standard, open them up for wider acceptance, and this whole dogfight goes away.

Imagine if the flash file format and player were open standards. Browser manufactures could easily build in native support for flash content. Adobe would still be the best place to get the tools needed to create flash, and would no longer have the burden of building players for every operating system and device.

The flash player sucks on OS X, that is a fact. Why not let Apple fix that by adding support for the flash standard to webkit? The same goes for Firefox and IE. With an open flash standard the user wins, the browser manufacturers win and more importantly, Adobe wins since it will help further drive adoption of their standard while offloading a large part of the development needed to drive that adoption.

In closing

I agree with most of the points made by Grant Skinner about the vitriol that has been spewed during this debate. I am by no means a Flash advocate but there are scenarios that it makes perfect sense to use it, like web video and immersive experiences. It will be years before alternative methods of achieving those results mature outside of Flash, if they do at all.

Adobe could make the entire issue moot by opening the format and player so that it can become a standard, in the truest sense of the word, and fill our world with bucket loads of win.