As a strong supporter of open source, doing a comparative analysis of HTML5 and Flash, I have to admit that private enterprise was able to kick the ball forward so much faster here ...<p>I remember watching a vector animation version of a &quot;tell-tale heart&quot; in flash in 1998.  On a 28.8 connection it played smoothly full-screen on a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of ram.  I remember clicking the play button and having it just miraculously starting to play without any wait, streaming down and uncompressing in real time.  I was floored by it.  12 years later I was invited to watch a spiderman animation  demo using HTML5 ... there was a 30 second load time, the framerate was probably 1fps, the audio didn&#x27;t work, the content didn&#x27;t render properly ...<p>It&#x27;s like how Microsoft was able to pull off nearly everything we could do today by shoe-horning their activeX technology into ie3.  Just load a bunch of cab files and drop them into the page like OLE components and bam, you got just about everything.  The interactivity could bootstrap - that is, not need any extra plugin and you could engage with the other content on the site using vbscript or javascript interfaces in a two-way manner.  It was pretty nice.<p>Netscape retorted with their JVM integration but it just wasn&#x27;t the same ...