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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.

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-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...

Why was ActiveX dead? Why didn't it succeed when MS launched it at a time IE had 90%+ user share?

Because it required Windows in a time that iPhones were storming the market.

Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.