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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

But why? Re-creating Flash makes sense to me because of the sheer amount of content, but the only thing I can think of that used Silverlight was Netflix ... years ago.

Is Silverlight really a game changer such that it's worth bringing back from the dead?

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Well Silverlight did have the best official avatar of any Microsoft product, Hikaru Aizawa[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa

I think Silverlight could have been more of a thing if MS handled their UI story better -- WPF/Silverlight was great to develop for and it did solve some problems. I remember that Windows Phone (which also was pretty good) didn't run Silverlight sites -- I always thought that was the weirdest choice, because if it did it would have provided a great mobile experience for it's time.

The future of Silverlight and Flash died when mobile phones rejected browser plugins. No amount of good choices from MS/Adobe would change that.

Wasn't that the HTML5 which predicated the Flash video demise? Not sure if it affected Silverlight to the same extent.

Yet, the other day I saw another Flash update pop up on Win 10 laptop in Edge. I don't even know why it's still needed.... What a strange ritual (now it's pushidng McAfee along).

Edit: FYI, quoting from the Wired, 2017:

Adobe itself acknowledged the transition [from Flash over to HTML5], though a bit less bluntly:

“As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.”

https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/

They were dying before that. Open web standards were a big thing for anyone doing front-end dev then. iphone not supporting flash was just another nail in the coffin... turned out to be a big nail.

I remember installing it to watch the Feynman lectures, but it looks like Microsoft have made them available without Silverlight now:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richar...

They really should have positioned Silverlight as a portable .net environment that runs everywhere, and not as a "flash substitute". I liked it.

I recently installed some industrial software that still uses Silverlight. I only needed some header files and promptly removed the foul beast.

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