Full Flash Player 10 for Q2 2010 on every major smartphone except iPhone

Is that on a linux box?

EDIT: I think I know why: poor Flash performance combined with the superior mobile user experience of a specialist app!

it's hard to navigate pretty much any car manufacturer's website these days without flash.

B) Some flash video player wrappers are much worse than others. Hulu's is particularly slow, Comedy Central's basically refuses to work on Linux.

C) Flash has to do the YUV->RGB conversion internally so that it can composite your poorly-conceived UI on top of it. It's almost immune to hardware acceleration (except in full-screen mode). Then it has to run in the main() thread of an intrinsically memory-gobbling application.

D) All of the above

Flash runtime seems to be pretty slow, as for animating and as for executing ActionScript itself. I don't know how much AS3 helps in that, though. Compositing in Flash can be pretty heavy: SWF videoplayers often have a mix of layers for controls, progress bars, advertisements etc. that all have to be composited on top of each other. Even worse, the SWF videoplayer might be set to run at 40 FPS or 60 FPS eventhough the video itself runs only at 25 fps, for example. This means that Flash tries to render much more and more often than is needed for the video alone. This all happily cumulates: even if we can decode video frames fast enough, the frames still have to be synchronized through the choking Flash core and compositing which may be running late, causing delayed or dropped frames, jittering, unresponsiveness etc.

If we played H.264 videos via HTML5 and JavaScript/CSS, I suspect that websites could (and would!) still program their videplayers to do too much and eventually choke on scripting and rendering. Similarly, I guess it's possible to create a lean&mean Flash videoplayer that just basically shows the video layer at the video FPS and nothing else.

Disclaimer: I work on next-gen smartphones in a closely related field. YouTube chokes my EeePC 901 on Ubuntu; it runs much better on these little next-gen devices where practically anything graphics related is being accelerated.

-Lousy internationalization(showstopper language-specific input bugs have remained unfixed for a year+)

-Inconsistent API access(For example, you can load a Sound from a ByteArray, but not a Video.....), new features are arbitrarily exposed via one of the Flash IDE, AS3 APIs, and MXML and not necessarily the others.

-Default fonts fall back on system fonts. Hence many swfs render text incorrectly, sometimes illegibly, on platforms lacking the fonts they were built for.

-Major performance variations across platforms. Using lots of alpha transparency for your game? Then say goodbye to Linux, because alpha is absurdly slow on that platform. (Plus to rub salt in the wound, since there's no palettized, colorkeyed transparency, that's kind of the only option for most layered effects.)

I have this dim hope that the JVM will somehow reemerge as a strong browser gaming platform, as it has great modern languages and tons of libraries and infrastructure - putting it technically well ahead of any other option I know of, but MS played that crucial king-maker role for large-scale deployment of Flash early on; nothing points to that scenario ever happening for the JVM. So if you want to reach the largest gaming audience possible Flash is still going to be "it" for the foreseeable future.