The cross-platform framework offers the most compelling web development experience

Websites today, including the one you are using now, are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. You probably read that and think to yourself well, yeah, that’s patently obvious. If I told you to create a website without using any of these three technologies, you would probably have some questions.

And yet, throughout the course of history, we’ve had many players in this space. We’ve had Flash, we’ve had Silverlight, all competing technologies that have attempted to shave off a slice of the browser market, to let the developer use a different technology to create a website. But none of them have really ever taken off. So how is it possible that I am coming to you, dear reader, and telling you that there could yet again be a competitor in this space? Especially after literally none of the other players in this space have gone anywhere, despite years of effort?

Well, let’s take a minute to appreciate the things that these past attempts have had in common, namely:

1. **They needed a browser plugin to run. **They normally need a platform-specific browser plugin to run on a targeted platform. Silverlight is a good example of this — at the time, people who use Linux couldn’t watch Netflix, as the site depended on Silverlight (which wasn’t available for Linux). Sure, there were open source alternatives, but nothing first-party.
2. **They introduced security vulnerabilities. **Flash was notorious for this ( with over 1,000 known vulnerabilities). The browser would have to load a plugin to display the content, and at that point, none of the security safeguards of the browser mattered, as the plugin had complete access to the host computer.
3. **The performance was not as good as pure HTML. **In terms of whether it was faster to load a plugin and display some text, it was always faster to just do it in raw HTML and CSS as opposed to trying to load a plugin to display some content for you.
4. HTML5 came, and CSS improved. Suddenly, creating beautiful, involving experiences wasn’t impossible. Better still, browsers that hated standards, used weird hacks, or used vendor-specific implementations instead of their CSS equivalents (like Internet Explorer) were killed off.

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