I never really thought of myself as a Fanboy of anything...I'm too cynical perhaps. But with the unfortunately named IPad arriving, the Flash haters have come out of the woodworks saying that Apple's continued lack of support of Flash will be the end of flash. Their reasoning? Something called HTML 5 and the video tag. The nice thing about about HTML 5 is that when it finally arrives then you will theoretically be able to put a <video> tag in your HTML and the browser will just play it. Of course, that makes light of the many varied video formats available, and Apple is really only supporting one video codec for its browser. While I DO think HTML 5 is a great direction head, I think it is almost as mythical as the IPad was two weeks ago ("it will do this and this and that and this"). I find it annoying how quickly everyone is to criticize flash. Some truly wonderful things have been created with flash; one only needs to search the NYTimes for interactive to see what I mean. And, well, frankly the HTML 5 Canvas element is just a glorified Flash sprite with a javascript backend. Is really the only advantage of HTML 5 is that the browsers will support it and you don't have to install an extra plugin? That is, IF they support it at all, Internet Explorer doesn't yet. You also hope that each browser will support the same specification, otherwise you are stuck in a potential AJAX hell of writing code for each browser's implementation. That's what happened with Internet Explorer. At least with Flash you know it will run the same in each browser. People point to performance, but I haven't seen anyone do anything with performance and HTML 5, so who knows if it will be better. Playing video and games is a drain on the battery regardless. I don't deny that Flash will go away eventually, especially if HTML 5 turns out to be as good as everyone says it will be. And, transitioning to HTML 5 and javascript won't be too painful given the similarities with Actionscript. I just don't think that people should criticize Flash, because in the end it does give us good web experiences.