Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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 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.