What is your complaint about silver light? From a user perspective, the only issue I had with it was that you had to install yet another software plugin. But if it’s invisible to end users, I don’t see an issue. Though maybe you developed in it?

I honestly don't know if that's a silverlight issue or implementation problem, but having to work with admin consoles implemented in silverlight in Microsoft product I can say they offer awful experience.

Loading time is terrible, movement between fields is clunky and if you use tab to pass fields your input will be deleted. Left clicks are not a thing. Moving back and forth lose state. Responsive design is not a thing.

I'm waiting so long for it to reach end of life already.

Most of those things happen regardless of UI tech, in HTML as well. That's less an argument against a particular framework, but rather an argument to not build shoddy UIs.

It is way worse than your average HTML. Again, I'm not sure if those defects are the framework faults or the UI implementation, but deleting input from field when pressing tab isn't something I encountered in any HTML interface. Loading time is also similar to a desktop 1st person shooter, not to HTML.

That's totally app's fault rather than Silverlight as a tech.

Trust was my biggest objection to it... There was no reasonable/complete Linux implementation available, and at that point Microsoft had never supported a technology (other than office) outside of Windows for more than 2 releases that I could recall.

In general, I really liked the package model, it's close to what I'd hoped Flash would become after Adobe acquisition. I do like React a bit better than Silverlight, but the tech and usability wasn't really bad, just more of a risk aversion for myself.

If MS had created an open-source client implementation that was patent unencumbered that other browsers could have integrated, with open tooling, I think it would have gone better. Can't speak to this implementation. For the Blazor efforts, payload size just feels excessively huge to me, and server-side renders feel as laggy as the original ASP.Net lifecycle round trip.

I'd probably be more inclined to work towards tooling for other languages that have a lighter wasm target (Rust in particular) and either web canvas or something like yew. All of that said, I'm pretty happy with React these days.

If the web kept going down that path, we’d end up with a dozen equivalents of Flash and Silverlight, dooming the web to become a closed hellscape.

Pandora box is already open, the only way back is to remove WebAssembly from the browsers.

https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly

https://platform.uno/showcases/

https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpj.html

At least you can sandbox and run webassembly everywhere with an open interpreter/JIT. With plugins you have to trust and install some binary code on your system, no sandboxing, no idea what it does and what it can access, etc. Much worse.

JavaScript based exploits show how well it works.

"the only issue I had with it was that you had to install yet another software plugin"

The spinning loading icon for 30s to 60s was fun (big silverlight sites).