&gt; In the old but waning status quo, Adobe and Microsoft got to decide which browsers would work with Silverlight and Flash (right?)<p>Nope. The status quo was that any browser which implemented NPAPI (officially the Mozilla plugin API, but historically used by everyone but IE) could use Silverlight and Flash. That&#x27;s how Google Chrome got Flash support initially and the reason why obscure browsers that neither Adobe and Microsoft cared about could still support both.