> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.
Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-b...
> Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
Silverlight was a responsive to flash.
It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.