It's also a total canard: hardware decoding is virtually brand-new in Flash. I think it only came with 10.1, right? But the performance problem and disparities

It's also a total canard: hardware decoding is virtually brand-new in Flash. I think it only came with 10.1, right? But the performance problem and disparities have been around for much, much longer. With things like version 9, Adobe were much more upfront. There was a puff blog touting how 9 was much faster on the Mac because they were no longer doing some ludicrously expensive font-checking in the middle of (what should have been) very tight loops. Which do you buy: Adobe can't make Flash reasonable on the Mac because of mean ol' Apple, or they choose not to because of (understandable, given how Apple treats them on things like Carbon) institutional bias towards Windows and a nasty, hairy codebase?