ShhhDontTell

You're forced to work in other systems, too. I don't see your point. Unless you want UBI to be high enough that you needn't work?

They were dying before that. Open web standards were a big thing for anyone doing front-end dev then. iphone not supporting flash was just another nail in the coffin... turned out to be a big nail.

It gave the front end developer access to the native win32 API througb COM. That means you could effectively write a native app and deliver it over the web. Powerful but also malware-prone.