Some people seem to be forgetting that Flash has never been a "part" of IE / FireFox / Safari. It is a separate application plugin written by Adobe. It could be Adobe not wanting to expend resources to support the iPhone (they've let their PPC version die on the vine as well). Also remember Adobe only recently bothered to get the current vesion of Flash running on Linux (which has many more users than the non-released iPhone) in any reasonable fashion.
Now- remember that Safari v3 on PCs has SVG support. SVG is a more open standard for vector graphics that Firefox also supports. This is a very capable area where browser vendors can acually implement themselves (which they *cannot* do with something proprietary like Flash)
Will Safari on iPhone support SVG? If so, I think that's something very positive...
It's up to Apple to implement the FL 2x, or FP7 SDK into the iPhone, not Adobe.
Flash has not died on the PocketPC. It runs F7, which is the latest player for non-standard OSs. This is the only area Adobe has yet to expand and you can bet it's on their list of things to do. Only Linux, OS X and Windows have access to the FP8+ SDKs. Adobe has also put quite a bit of energy into Flash Lite 2x, which is basically F7 optimized for mobile devices and their limitations. Windows Mobile runs FL, as does my Nokia. Most mobile devices are not capable of handling what Flash 8 and later offers.
Flash Player 7 was available for Linux. They bypassed FP8, but that really wasn't an issue since FP9 was made available shortly after Flash 8 was released. Adobe has put much energy into Linux. FP7 had major issues on that platform, so they focused on making sure that FP9 performed well on it. It has been Adobe's goal to get all 3 platforms up to par and they're almost to that point. This was no small feet and is needed for their whole AIR agenda. Why hasn't Apple released iTunes for Linux, or how about Safari? I know they're different, but still... Does Apple not want to expand their resources?
SVG has required a plug-in for browser like IE and Safari in the past. Oh, and BTW, Adobe helped to develop SVG.
Flash is proprietary, but Adobe keeps their standards quite open. FLEX is open source. ActionScript is open source.
Flash works 99.99999999% the same across all major browser that support it. This is simply "not" true for SVG, which isn't even close to reaching that level of compatibility.
The .1% on Flash are things like missing mouse-wheel support on the Mac, but this is implementable via JS on the Mac side. I can't help the PC for missing bitmap font support,but that's an eh.
See for yourself;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(SVG)
As a plug-in, Flash has a major advantage over browser specific implementations of SVG by provided a consistent standard. And because big companies like Adobe are behind it, I'm privy to very power full development tools with lots of powerful features and a massive install base of users.
I'll know more focus on developing for SVG instead of Flash, than I would to dump Photoshop in favor of GIMP.
Anyway, the iPhone isn't even out yet, so I'm more than confident we will see some sort of Flash support shortly, along with the other features that will be missing at launch. Flash for phones is still new to the US market.
<]=)
