First off, you are describing a plugin, I am not saying that the Flash plugin was not without it's problems. Only that it could do more than HTML5 can do today 8 years ago AND had almost universal penetration. Stepping back is my problem with standards and HTML5. I am not saying that Flash ever was the answer. I am merely using it as an example that proves that standards will always hold back innovation, and I think that an open plugin standard could yield the best of both worlds.
We tried the plugin model back in the 90's. It was uniformly rejected by users and developers alike.
This is just wrong. It was on 98% of desktops and there were over 1 million Flash developers. Mobile is what really hurt flash (actually IOS's rejection of it)
flash is going the way of the dodo because innovation couldn't happen at top speed, because it was limited by a gatekeeper that insisted on keeping it closed
It still managed to stay FAR in front of other web technologies which stood nearly at a standstill for over a decade. Closed is not what I am suggesting anyway. Sure someone can develop an plugin that is closed, but the plugin architecture itself will be open and adopted by all browsers who want to compete.
The lacklustre support for Silverlight was a demonstration of how badly we were burned by flash.
I disagree, I think that Microsoft's stagnation and terrible management of 95% browser share is what doomed any web UI tooling to come out of Redmond. Internet Explore was so riddled with bugs, so vulnerable to virii/malware and so stagnant that it became a stench in the mind of nearly every web developer. This was the biggest mistake IMO that Microsoft has EVER made. They could have pushed innovation and owned the search engine market at the same time. They will never get it back from Google now.
While it's taking a long time to catch up, we're now free to expand the capabilities without being in a situation where a single party can hold everyone for ransom by refusing to support specific browsers or OS's.
Having a standard for plugins in the browser would not allow this situation to happen. A lot has changed in the last 12 years. Sure Macromedia was the only one who made a viable plugin to fill up the Internet Explorer window with, but that would not be the case today. We would see open source and competing products popping up everywhere - Just like the JavaScript/CSS/HTML5 frameworks we are seeing pop up every month. These frameworks try to innovate past the limitations and cumbersome methods that the standards constrain us to. We would be a lot better off if there was an open and secure plugin architecture with access to a VM, Drawing and DOM API (Perhaps the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript implementation would even run on top of this API).