For a prime example of how crappy Flash is, just look at where Silverlight is and how long it has taken to get there. It is gaining traction all the time and is incredibly stable. Flash is now being pushed by Silverlight and imo it is a good thing. I have researched and used HTML5 extensively and would still argue that it is still lagging well behind the capabilities of the plug-in marketplace. For content rich sites, Silverlight and Flash are still going to be around for a long time, HTML5 hasn't even been endorsed fully by the W3C. HTML is such a sloppy language and browser rending is not an exact art, so until those things are fixed, I vote for plug-ins that are consistent in their functionality and rendering.