I'm not so sure about that, I bet we'd probably still have Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight and ActiveX controls. The web was a mess before. The recent capture by big platforms is more about taking you out of the web, into their superapps.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
Oh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.
Yeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone.
That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks.
Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari.
It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.