There’s a somewhat verbose essay over at Daring Fireball on Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone. If you’ve ever properly hated a Flash plugin on whatever OS before, you’ve already thought a lot of what the post has to say.

In addition, Gruber notes that Apple have clear business motives to try and rid themselves of the Flash platform. But regardless of their motives, I think the important point is that they’re getting away with it: everybody’s buying iPhones.

Can we draw a lesson from that? Over in proprietary land, one single exec (Jobs himself?) can decide that there will be no Flash support, period. And this seems to be an effective way of ridding us of a proprietary “standard”.

So maybe we should all pretend for a moment that Mozilla’s execs have that kind of power, too. Suppress that urge to grab an x264-plugin, and we might just avoid another round of pain. Apple’s not going to save the day: they’re on the other camp for this one.

(Of course it won’t work. They don’t have that power, and I don’t think too many people care about any of these issues)