Well, to me that is the same thing, because since it was proprietary, Steve Jobs and Apple could not control it (and maybe improve it and adopt to their standar

Well, to me that is the same thing, because since it was proprietary, Steve Jobs and Apple could not control it (and maybe improve it and adopt to their standards) - so they rather threw it out. (not that apple had a problem with proprietary tools, justs with proprietary tools not under their control, in a vital position) If the Flash player would have been open in a way, chromium/webkit is, with many top players working on it - it very likely would still be around and maybe even dominating, as it was way superior in terms of features and more importantly, it was not a mess to work with, like HTML still is.