Well, here is my experiences with trying to go flash free...
I host a webpage for my friends' (amateur) band. On the webpage, I have little boxes for each of their albums and songs, and in these boxes, I embed a flash player that can be used to play the song. (I've been using the Creative Commons licensed
dewplayer.) The flash player works great. I've never had any problems with it.
There are about 30 songs listed on the website.
So out comes the iPad, and I think to myself,
oh, it would be great to have an HTML5 fall-back for the flash player for those who can't use flash...
So inside the <object> tags used to embed the flash player, I put in HTML5 audio tags to load an HTML5 audio player if flash is not supported. Worked fine in Firefox, Chrome and even Safari for windows.
So then my friend on a mac writes me an email telling me that every time he visits the webpage, it crashes his mac.
I investigate, and it turns out that Safari for mac does not honor the lack of the older-draft HTML5 autobuffer attribuite, nor does it support the newer "preload=none" HTML5 audio/video attribute, and as a result preloads
all HTML5 audio or video on a page no matter how the page is coded. This is true
even admitted by Safari. (I don't know about iPhones, but the iPad tries to autbuffer everything too, as I know from playing around with one at the store.)
So the result is that anyone trying to visit my page in Safari was slowed down by trying to autobuffer well over 100MB of audio files, usually resulting in a locked up browser, or at least lag so severe that it makes my site unusable.
Great Job, Mr. Jobs. Your arguments that flash is prone to crash got me to change my website, which worked fine when it was all flash, so that it
crashes Apple's own browser on Apple products, but nothing else. Job well done, yes, Mr. Jobs.
So, I was forced to remove all the fallback HTML5 audio tags from the site. Then I decide that maybe the thing to do would be to use, instead, a play button, which when clicked, would, via javascript, insert the HTML5 audio tags then, so that they would only "exist", and hence only buffer once the button was clicked.
Anyway, that works just fine for most browsers I've tested with, but I tried loading my page with an iPad at the store, and the embedded audio files played, but at the wrong frequency, sounding like chipmunks. Maybe I could figure out what was wrong after some testing, and implement more work-arounds, but since I don't own any Apple products (and certainly am not going to buy them now), it's just too hard to do the necessary testing.
Anyway, I think I'm just going to give up completely trying to get HTML5 to work well with Mobile Safari, and just revert to flash-only.
And if you're curious,
here's the site in question (the reverted-to original state, with only Flash players), and
here is the temporary experimental page that has a fallback that inserts a button to insert the HTML5. (It'll look identical to the previous page if you have a flash plug in installed.)