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Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.

• mickelsen 2y ago
  Yeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone. That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks. Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari. It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
• michaelt 2y ago
  The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-watch-instantly-to-macs-via-silverlight.html https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143979 https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...
• asadotzler 2y ago
  Why was ActiveX dead? Why didn't it succeed when MS launched it at a time IE had 90%+ user share?
  • pixl97 2y ago
    Because it required Windows in a time that iPhones were storming the market. Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.