[thawaway1837]

Because there was no open source alternative, the web was a terrible app platform (and frankly it’s still not as good as Silverlight was a decade ago).

In an alternative universe where Silverlight, instead of Flash, had become the de facto standard before the iPhone, I suspect we would likely have moved onto something like OpenSilver instead of HTML5 as the backbone for web applications.

Flash was designed for tiny animations and somehow became an application platform. Sikverlight was actually designed as an application platform and it showed, in how much better it was.

[tasogare]

I totally agree. I’ve been mainly using the Silverlight-based SDK that powered Windows Phone, and the easiness to made an app with is still unmatched. The ability to make reusable components, complex layout (grids) and design without CSS enabled real productivity. Sure the web now got most of those things, a decade later...