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Why did Microsoft Silverlight fail? What were the problems with it?
- rkagerer 8y agoThis may be a controversial answer but my opinion, in a nutshell, is because of business decisions that prevented or discouraged it from being supported by platforms beyond Microsoft's. As a developer I had no interest in tying myself down to a technology that didn't work on all the devices my users loved. There was some effort to port it to Linux, but it was too little, too late. We really needed Microsoft to not only release the whole shebang into the wild, but make it attractive for Mozilla, Apple, eventually Google, and the whole ecosystem to adopt. Flash was dying and there was a great opportunity give the world a platform to enable more rich web applications than were possible on the standards-based frameworks of the time. Thankfully WebAssembly does not repeat this mistake.
- Something1234 8y ago> Thankfully WebAssembly does not repeat this mistake. Really, I don't think that WebAssembly brings any real benefit to the user. It just lets bad devs, stuff more crap down the users throat faster. Whatever gains are made by a technology will be eaten away by adtech.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y agoI loved developing in Silverlight, it was a dream having VisualStudio to dev in compared to Flash. And it had some neat features like smooth streaming with IIS etc. But it was terribly timed to the market. Most mobiles didn't support it, people didn't want to install yet another plugin. And it had to compete with a native web which was becoming more multimedia friendly. E.g. how many video players online require flash these days?