Comment by piskov
2 days ago
Microsoft Silverlight.
Full C# instead of god forbidden js.
Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier).
MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup.
Excellent tooling, static analysis, debugging, what have you.
Rendered and worked completely the same in any browser (safari, ie, chrome, opera, firefox) on mac and windows
If that thing still worked, boy would we be in a better place regarding web apps.
Unfortunately, iPhone killed adobe flash and Silverlight as an aftermath. Too slow processor, too much energy consumption.
I am happy this one died. It was just another attempt by Microsoft to sidestep open web standards in favor of a proprietary platform. The other notorious example is Flash, and both should be considered malware.
Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
6 replies →
Flash & Silverlight were both ahead of the current open web standards at the time. They also didn't suffer as much from the browser wars.
Flash's ActionScript helped influence changes to modern JS that we all enjoy.
You sometimes need alternative ideas to promote & improve ideas for open web standards.
What web standards? :-)
Stuff like angularjs was basically created for the same reason flash/silverlight went down — iphone
Did Silverlight have the same security issues as Flash?
Yes, even using C# couldn't save them.
> A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious decoder that can return negative offsets that cause Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb...
Probably didn’t have the level of adoption needed for the nefarious types to justify spending time finding Silverlight exploits.
I loved silverlight. Before I got a “serious” job, I was a summer intern at a small civil engineering consultancy that had gradually moved into developing custom software that it sold mostly to local town/city/county governments in Arizona (mostly custom mapping applications; for example, imagine Google Maps but you can see an overlay of all the street signs your city owns and click on one to insert a note into some database that a worker needs to go repair it… stuff like that).
Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.
I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.
Sounds like a nice gig.
> It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder
IIRC around that time, you could also distribute full-blown desktop applications (C# WinForms) in a special way via the browser, by which they were easily installable and self-updating. The tech was called ClickOnce https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/cl.... I think the flow was possibly IE-only, but that was not a big issue in a business context at that time.
Silverlight at some point was part of windows update, so most people needn’t do anything — just open the link.
Both a Silverlight and Adobe Flex fan here!
Back in the day Microsoft sent someone to our university to demo all of their new and upcoming products. I remember Vista (then named Longhorn) and Silverlight being among them. I also remember people being particularly impressed by the demo they gave of the latter, but everything swiftly falling apart when someone queried whether it worked in other browsers. This was at a time when IE was being increasingly challenged by browsers embracing open standards. So there was an element of quiet amusement/frustration in seeing them continue to not get it.
Are you sure? Even at launch, Silverlight 1.0 supported IE, Firefox, and Safari
This is what the MS rep giving the demo said on the day. It turns out you're correct, but they had convinced me otherwise for close to 20 years!