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.
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.