
Why did Microsoft Silverlight fail? What were the problems with it? - PretzelFisch
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-Silverlight-fail-What-were-the-problems-with-it/answer/Rocky-Lhotka?share=4c4f041a
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rkagerer
This 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.

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Something1234
> 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.

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ElCapitanMarkla
I 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?

