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

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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piskov ◴[12 Oct 25 03:59 UTC] No.45555096[source]▶
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.

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drnick1 ◴[12 Oct 25 04:10 UTC] No.45555141[source]▶
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.
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Rohansi ◴[12 Oct 25 04:30 UTC] No.45555238[source]▶
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?
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motorest ◴[12 Oct 25 06:02 UTC] No.45555658[source]▶
> 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.

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1. Rohansi ◴[12 Oct 25 17:31 UTC] No.45560043[source]▶
It's not that it's a problem I just don't think it's the best place to be. It was not designed to be used like this. Yes, it's better now but it's still not great - you still ship JS as text blobs that need to be parsed and compiled by every browser.

I don't see how alternatives to JavaScript are a risk to open web standards. WebAssembly is itself a part of those same standards. It's just a shame that it was built as an extension of JavaScript instead of being an actual alternative.