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Comment by TwistedWeasel | Hacker News Reader

FTA: "On the iPhone, you're as locked in with HTML5 as you were with Flash everywhere else before"

In what way has Flash ever been the only way to display web content? This statement is absurd.

The point is: the reason Flash was bad was that the only way to display Flash content was with Adobe's (buggy) implementation.

HTML5 on the iPhone is just as bad: the only way to display HTML5 content is with Apple's (buggy) implementation.

That makes sense to me, as I read the article it sounded like he was saying that outside iOS he was locked in to Flash in the same way as he is locked in to HTML5 on iOS.

The iOS restriction is very real and enforced, there is nothing forcing people to use Flash for any popular platform.

However if you put it in terms of "if I want to use Flash, I'm forced into Adobe's implementation" then I can see that argument.

There's no other vendor than Apple providing access to HTML5 content on iOS. Apple forbids it.

Similarly, there's not other vendor than Adobe providing access to Flash.

Flash was the standard. Sure, you could use something else, but that something else most likely worked for less viewers. And the plugin-gap is real -- asking users to install a plugin causes some users to skip and move on.

To ignore the previous ubiquity of Flash is absurd.

Well, but that's not a lock in. It's just the incompetence of Adobe's competition to make an alternative.

And again you fail to see the point of the blog post.

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