I agree with you, but a few minor points:<p>Flash managed to evolve with the bandwidth (and came across as sexier than Java Applets) and by doing so more and more users had it installed and eventually it got to the point where you "just could not" go to a website without being prompted to install the plugin (yes, plugin, not part of the browser core).<p>At this point you could not stop it (from a vendor's perspective), so run with it. With the lessons of the past in mind and HTML5 still not being widely deployed, yeah, I'd say stand your ground. And from that angle I'd say it's more similar to ActiveX than Flash.<p>It's semantics. But I think it was a non-bad decision to include it in the default installation procedure.<p>(edit: Actually, reading back, one might say that I don't agree with you! :)