Are you sure about this? Wouldn't it be easier to write FLV support on the iPhone than to re-encode hundreds of millions of videos?

youtube didn't re-encode videos to get on iphone. It just so happened that youtube wanted to provide High quality videos in h.264 format and iPhone supports it

I think the problem there is Apple - they don't want Flash support on the iPhone. They haven't explicitly stated so, but I think they don't want it because it would give people the ability to develop full iPhone applications that don't go through their store and approval process.

That's also why they're never going to support HTML5, client-side storage, or geo-location in Mobile Safari.

Is this a joke? I honestly can't tell, because of all the following:

- Mobile Safari already supports local storage

- Mobile Safari already supports geolocation: http://geekswithblogs.net/MobileLOB/archive/2009/06/19/getti...

- Mobile Safari also already has other portions of HTML 5 implemented, such as canvas, not to mention really good coverage of css 3.

So as it turns out shipping Mobile Safari already has much better HTML 5 support than many desktop browsers. You may be able to fault iPhone and Mobile Safari a lot of things, but standards support is certainly not one of them.

Sarcasm doesn't always go over well here.

Fair enough - but I can't think of any other reason why Apple would reject Adobe's advances for getting Flash on the iPhone.

The innovation-stifling effects of browser lock-in require development to be expensive. Any compelling product in such an environment will be built to maximize revenue, which requires those products to support as wide of a consumer base as possible. This makes it difficult to build products with new technologies.

Today, development is cheap. Compelling products can be built as side projects with a minimal investment of time and money. If creators don't have to worry about making money with their creations, they're more likely to use whatever technology they feel like using.

If Mobile Safari lags behind other browsers in implementing emerging web standards, many developers will run browsers that stay current, even if they have to buy a new phone to do so. When they come up with nifty ideas that are relatively easy to build, they'll use whatever technologies they want, which will occassionally be HTML5 and friends. After normal iPhone users come across enough neat hacks that their phone can't run because their phone can't support it, they'll switch phones.

I doubt that Apple would let Mobile Safari lag behind other browsers, especially since they'll likely want desktop Safari to support emerging standards, but even if they did, it would be self-defeating.