Don't be fooled by
all the curves

Proprietary rich media techologies, such as Flash and Silverlight, threaten the open nature of the internet, warned the founder of Mozilla Europe this week.

Mozilla's Tristan Nitot made the statements at London's Internet World conference on Tuesday, ZDNet reports.

With upcoming revision of the HTML specification, HTML 5, Nitot said technology like Flash and Silverlight will no longer be necessary for disseminating popular content, such as video, online and via mobile.

Nitot said Adobe's Flash is on 98 percent of all PCs worldwide. He asserted "proprietary" rich media technologies, such as those owned by Adobe and Microsoft, are subject to the agendas of their parent companies.

"You're producing content for your users and there's someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content," Nitot said.

"If Adobe or Microsoft decides to compete with you and you're using their technology, you cannot compete."

It would appear that Apple's Steve Jobs agrees with Nitot, at least where rejecting Flash is concerned. Jobs said the company has no plans to implement Flash on iPhone, arguing it would slow the unit down.

iPhone users generate 50 times more Google searches than other mobile handsets, which likely made the Flash snub especially irritating for Adobe.

But after the debut of the iPhone SDK, Adobe announced its intentions to launch an iPhone-ready Flash client anyway. Users that wish to may download it from the iTunes App Store.