There has, for some reason, been a war raging among the geek community for a while now: HTML 5 vs. Flash. There has also been a corporate spat of sorts between Google and Apple and with its latest announcement, it looks like Google is taking another shot at Jobs and co.

Steve Jobs has been fairly outspoken against Flash and has stated that Apple will not actively support the format. Instead, he favors HTML 5. However, Adobe’s Flash Player has an incredible market penetration at over 98% with nearly 93% of users having version 10 or higher. Obviously Adobe is a huge name in the web space and now they have teamed with arguably the single most important web company: Google.

Google recently announced that the Flash Player plugin will become integrated with their popular Chrome browser and Chrome OS. Downloading and installing Chrome will automatically install the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player essentially making it a browser standard by making the player a part of the browser. Gizmodo likens the feature to a browser’s javascript engine “Most people don’t have strong opinions about their browser’s integrated Javascript engine, so it follows that they wouldn’t have strong opinions about that part of their browser that makes their YouTubes go LOL.”

Google has released a statement explaining why they are integrating Flash and they make some interesting points, “Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.”

Does Google see this as a legitimate opportunity to improve a user’s web experience or are they simply trying to vex Apple as much as possible? Given the current battle between the iPhone and Android devices, it’s not hard to imagine Google getting a certain bit of satisfaction out of backing another platform that Steve Jobs dislikes.