I have long been a critic of elements of the mainstream media who repeatedly fall down on the job when it comes to tech companies, particularly Apple. Some of the assumptions so-called expert commentators make would seem downright funny, if it wasn’t so tragic. I mean, how are the interests of a public who wants to be informed being served?

Yes, I do understand the problems they confront, having worked in the mainstream media, as a broadcast journalist, for a number of years. And, now, as the host of two radio talk shows, I have to toe the line between letting someone just talk and asking serious, sometimes critical questions. There’s a fine distinction between being responsible and just plain becoming insulting. Some hosts of mainstream interview shows fail to see the distinction.

At the same time, I have to wonder why far too many members of the press just let things slide when it comes to some of Apple’s critics, even though they are quick to lambast the company for real or imagined ills. If I had a penchant to believe conspiracy theories, I might even suggest some of Apple’s competitors are deliberately feeding some of these stories strictly for their own benefit.

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Once upon a time, there was a battle to the death between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Microsoft made their product leaner and meaner, forced it onto PC desktops, and, in the end, defeated an increasingly bloated rival.

On the Mac platform, Microsoft convinced (some say coerced) Apple to make Internet Explorer the default browser, and, for several years, this situation persisted. Indeed, the original Public Beta of Mac OS X had a native version of Internet Explorer.

Having won the browser wars, development of Internet Explorer languished on both the Mac and Windows platforms. No sense in investing development dollars for a product that is not only free, but is already way ahead of the pack. The few remaining rivals had pitiful market shares.

In the space of a few years, some fascinating things happened. Mozilla, the non-profit organization that rose out of the ashes of Netscape came up with Firefox. Apple, not seeing any improvements in Internet Explorer, adapted a Unix-based browser engine, KHMTL, and created an open source alternative known as WebKit, which powered the Safari browser. In turn, Microsoft withdrew the Mac version of Internet Explorer.

Yes, Safari was lean when it came to features, but it blew the pants off IE when it came to performance and compatibility with most prevailing Web standards. Microsoft simply marched to its own beat, hoping to enforce proprietary standards that would tether people to their highly profitable products whenever possible.

As it stands in 2010, MSIE’s worldwide market share has dropped below 60%. Firefox has a good portion of the remainder, with Google Chrome (which uses Apple’s WebKit rendering engine), Safari and Opera bringing up the rear. There are other contenders, but these are the majors.

When it comes to performance and compatibility, Internet Explorer’s competition has worked hard to best the most difficult compatibility tests — currently Acid3 — and deliver blazing performance. It has almost reached the point where all or most of the alternative browsers deliver pages seamlessly, as fast as the state-of-the-art and connection speeds allow.

To nobody’s surprise, Microsoft has decided it’s high time to become competitive once again, and the forthcoming IE 9 promises to match the competition in all significant respects, including enhanced support for HTML5. There will, of course, be no returning to the Mac platform, even though the Bing search engine is now an option on the latest Safari.

The goal to boost performance and increase compatibility for all sites that are compliant with current standards has basically made your choice of browser almost a non-issue, at least if you’re not a power user. They all support a basic set of features, such as adding and managing bookmarks and delivering pages as tabs rather than new document windows.

Yes, you can list a number of areas where individual browsers sport unique capabilities, or at least different ways of doing the same things, and those features might appeal to power users who crave greater levels of control over their browsing experience.

At the same time, if you can depend on getting an essentially identical rendering experience regardless of which browser you choose — in other words pages look essentially the same — do the various and sundry choices matter so much anymore?

Now to be perfectly fair, the ongoing browser wars have been good, because the developers of each have had big incentives to make their products batter. That applies even more to Microsoft, which pretty much gave up on building a decent browser years ago, and left us with the pathetic Internet Explorer 6, notorious not just for its inability to fully support Web standards, but those well-known security lapses.

That Microsoft has decided to build a promising IE upgrade has little to do with the normal state of developing new products, but as the result of serious competition.

But for most of you, I dare say most any modern browser will get the job done. On a Mac, you can stick with Safari, unless another app has unique features you prefer. Indeed, I don’t perceive any significant advantages in Google Chrome that make me want to switch. Now that Safari supports extensions, one of the most intriguing options in Firefox may not be so compelling, unless you crave an add-on for which there’s no equivalent in Safari. And if there’s enough demand, a Safari version might ultimately arrive.

Opera often pioneers features that end up in other browsers. It’s a fairly lightweight app that also includes a decent email application, one that might be a deal maker if you aren’t enamored of Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Microsoft Entourage or any of the other popular alternatives.

For Windows users, when IE 9 comes out, I suppose it’ll be all right to upgrade. But since Microsoft must be dragged kicking and screaming to improve their browser, you’d be better off using something else, if only to send a message to Microsoft that they can’t take customers for granted and fall down on the job all over again.

So the news comes down this week that Adobe has at last updated Flash for the Mac to bring it closer in alignment to the Windows version at least in one key respect. There’s now limited support for H.264 hardware acceleration, but you have to wonder why it took them so long to get it done, and why only a limited number of Macs are supported.

Now which models are favored is also a question mark. Some stories specify the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M graphics cards, ATI need not apply. Other reports are more expansive, claiming support applies to, according to Macworld, “MacBooks shipped after January 21, 2009; Mac minis shipped after March 3, 2009; MacBook Pros shipped after October 14, 2008; and iMacs shipped after the first quarter of 2009. The Mac Pro and MacBook Air are not supported at this time.”

But at least it’s a more comprehensive list, and millions of Mac users have at least some hope of taking advantage of the added support.

What this means in the real world is that Flash can use these graphics chips to render H.264 Flash-based videos, rather than do it in software. The end result is that less system resources are used and performance is much faster. Owners of portable Macs can see improved battery life.

Adobe is now quoted as stating: “I know it is frustrating for GPU chips which are not compatible. Again, understand that this decision was not made by us and is not in our hands. We do rely on the Video Decode Acceleration framework provided by Apple, which works on specific NVIDIA cards only today.

“For ATI cards, we will need to wait until the Video Decode Acceleration framework does handle those cards.”

So I suppose that means it’s really Apple’s fault, and Adobe still has problems building Flash for Macs, or just doesn’t care to help add that support. More to the point, you surely cannot expect Adobe to actually deliver a credible version for Apple’s mobile products.

At the same time, the it has now been confirmed that the European Union is joining with our FTC to investigate Apple’s refusal to support Flash-based development tools for the iOS. Now I am not about to address the legal implications. As a practical matter, I agree that Apple’s announced reasons, to ensure that iPhone and iPad apps are easily capable supporting new features, seem reasonable.

Adobe can cry crocodile tears about this all day long, but if their motives are strictly based on greed — the possible impact to sales if fewer Flash tools are sold — then I’d pay them no mind. Besides, I suspect most customers buy Creative Suite apps as bundles, not individual products. That being the case, they get Flash authoring tools whether they want them or need them. If Adobe gave up on Flash, they’d spend less R&D cash developing their apps, and it’s questionable whether they’d really lose that many sales.

Of course, I may be dead wrong. It may be that loads of people choose Flash Professional to the exclusion of a Creative Suite bundle and that could, potentially harm Adobe. Then again, they also need to justify to their stockholders the billions spent in acquiring Flash as part of the acquisition of Macromedia some years back. No sense writing off that investment.

If I sound cynical about the whole thing, it seems to me that Apple is reacting not just to the whims of their chief control freak, CEO Steve Jobs, but is clearly concerned over the fact that Adobe cannot be depended upon to build Mac software promptly, with acceptable performance and reliability. They’ve been late to the party again and again, and this new Flash update, which omits key models in the Mac product lineup when it comes to hardware support, is evidence yet again that Adobe is forcing Apple to play second fiddle to the Microsoft platform.

Indeed, Adobe has always had a way to convince everyone that Apple was wrong about excluding Flash from the mobile platform. All they had to do was demonstrate that they can build a working version running on the latest version of the iOS. As Apple developers, this ought to be a trivial matter for Adobe, and they can even provide YouTube videos to show it can be done.

Except that no such proof-of-concept exists. Yes, there is a version of Flash working on Google’s Android OS, but performance is erratic, according to published reports, and there’s little evidence Adobe would fare any better on Apple’s mobile OS,

On the other hand, when it comes to the decisions made by government officials about whether a company is anticompetitive, they might be looking at the overall potential for harm, particularly to Adobe, not whether Apple was forced to reach a decision based on Adobe’s inaction.

In the end, it’s always possible Apple will be ordered to accept Flash-based development tools, and even to allow Adobe to build an iOS version of Flash. In that event, Apple would have to comply, even if the product was sub-standard.

But I really don’t think it’ll come to that, and I hope I’m right.

Microsoft has decided, in the wake of the now-ended “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign, to come out “swinging” and go after Apple. But you have to wonder who devised those comparisons on their site and what planet they actually living on, since it’s clearly not Earth.

One serious complaint, such as it is, appears to be the lack of Blu-ray on a Mac. This supposed to be some humongous blunder on the part of Apple, because so many people these days are buying high-definition movies. Well, not quite, as sales of both Blu-ray and regular DVDs are down over what they used to be even when combined, perhaps because there aren’t so many flicks you want to see again. They’ve already sold new versions of the old movies some of you had on VHS, not to mention Blu-ray counterparts of regular DVD fare.

Yes, you can get Blu-ray drives as an option on many PCs. I suppose if you expect to use your PC as a TV set, that’s a good thing, but as some have pointed out, Blu-ray is somewhat of a moving target. There’s now a 3D version, which requires media with twice the capacity and new hardware to match. I suppose that’ll mean something eventually, when people no longer have to spend a thousand dollars or more extra for a 3D TV.

Yes, there are external Blu-ray drive options for the Mac, but you’d need third-party software, since there’s no native support in Mac OS X. Blu-ray, according to Steve Jobs, remains a “bag of hurt.”

But the question is whether it matters, since you can get movies by other means, such as iTunes, Netflix and other online options.

More to the point, is this a compelling reason to use a PC rather than a Mac? I don’t think so. But Microsoft is desperate to convince you that the PC is cool and the Mac is an expensive, needless luxury that just can’t get the job done. And, no, I won’t cover the Microsoft’s grammatical lapses that have already been cited by others.

We do have a bunch of silly claims put forth on Microsoft’s site about the advantages of the PC, and anyone familiar with both platforms ought to consider  these arguments as pathetic as I do.

The Blu-ray option is part of the “Having Fun,” category, where the PC’s genuine advantage in gaming is extolled. If gaming is what you want, there’s a growing number of titles on the Mac, and you can still install Windows under Boot Camp if you must run titles unavailable on the former.

That’s as good as it gets for Microsoft. Under the “Simplicity” category they claim the PC is “easy to use, PCs do what you want: they just work.” That, of course, mimics the well-known argument made for Macs over the years. While Windows has grown better, it still takes far too many steps for simple driver installations and configurations. When things don’t work, it can become a nightmare. The “they just work” claim is a sad joke.

Microsoft also has a “Sharing” category, where they tout the ease of networking on a PC, and my response is the same.

Under “Working Hard,” Microsoft simply wants to convey the age-old myth that Macs are not suited for work environments. That’s hardly worth a response, since millions have been using Macs as their primary work computers for the past 26 years. Even Microsoft introduced its key productivity apps, Excel and Word, on the Mac first. Or maybe Steve Ballmer’s brain is too wasted to remember how former CEO Bill Gates double-crossed Apple and begat Windows using interface technology he snookered then-Apple CEO John Sculley to provide.

When it comes to “Compatibility,” most any peripheral anyone cares about runs on both the Mac and the PC, and manufacturers ignore the former to their peril. Indeed, lots of products do just work, since there is extensive built-in support for many of these devices in Snow Leopard.

Now when it comes to choice, if you crave a pink or a blue computer, you won’t find one in Apple’s arsenal. I suppose this is a matter of some degree of importance to potential customers who feel that Apple’s aluminum-clad design motif isn’t satisfactory for their needs, or they want processors and graphic card options that Apple doesn’t provide.

Of course, that’s largely window dressing, other than meeting the hardware needs of a devoted gamer. A different color or screen size doesn’t really deliver a machine with a superior operating system or superior product reliability, but that’s probably all that Microsoft has left these days since they cannot honestly boast of having a better operating system.

That, of course, is what you can readily conclude from Microsoft’s pathetic TV ads. People run around with silly grins on their faces because Windows 7 lets you pin document windows to the sides of the screen, as if this was the greatest invention since sliced bread. No wonder the stock market long ago gave up on Microsoft as a compelling investment.

Sure, Microsoft is still selling lots of software licenses. Many of these are to existing customers who couldn’t take Vista and stuck with XP. It’s also true that Microsoft has a huge momentum and overwhelming dominance of the PC operating system market. Nothing Apple can do can change that, except on a long term and probably in baby steps.

One has to conclude that Microsoft’s management has concluded that they need more smoke and mirrors to compete, and I feel bad for the people who are going to be taken in by this nonsense.