With the release of Silverlight 3.0 not long ago, Microsoft has shown a bit more detail on the plans it has for the technology in the future. According to CNET, Abu-Hadba (leader of Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism division) has said that half of all Internet-connected devices will be packing Silverlight by next year.Microsoft plans to expand their product to many different devices, including Apple's iPhone, and to do so they want to make sure that they don't have to create 'lite' versions of it. Scott Guthrie, Abu-Hadba's fellow developer unit executive, said, "We want to make sure people have a 'wow' experience," though they admit it's taken them longer than they'd have liked so far. As we speak, Microsoft is in beta testing stages of Silverlight for Android and Windows Mobile, and CNET expects announcements to be made at the Professional Developer Conference this fall, with Guthrie saying, "You are going to hear a lot more details about it later this year."
Interestingly, Abu-Hadba doesn't wonder if Silverlight will be with us in 10 years time... more, he brings up the uncertainty that Microsoft's rival will be, Adobe (due to their Flash software). He notes that Adobe is now a company that maintains a web platform for general purpose, rather than aiming at just being a design company, something that they can't keep up forever. "I don't think they will exist in 10 years in the form they are today," he said, but to quote CNET, "[imagine how] unthinkable it would have been to predict in 2000 that Sun Microsystems would go away."
Regardless, we'll see how far Silverlight has progressed by the year's end.
I'm not denying that it is...just wondering.
this is coming from someone that devs in flash ~50 hours a week as a career and hobby... and I dont expect to be switching to silverlight anytime soon, but maybe with it we'll see adobe stop releasing shoddy products.
I'm not denying that it is...just wondering.
I know that since Silverlight 3.0, it now support GPU acceleration for video content (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Silverlight_3.0 ), allowing better performance for HD content.
However most web developers know it is easy to create a flash animation, which might not be the case with Silverlight.
Windows only. Flash runs on everything.
Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and soon Android and Windows Mobile. Check your facts.
I don't understand why Silverlight is faster than Flash... They both run a VM with JIT compiler (Flash runs Tamarin, Silverlight runs kind of shortened .NET) , so the speed should be almost the same. For me (as a SL developer) silverlight doesn't work with graphics as fast as I would expect or want. Or you meant something else?
There is linux version as well, don't remember name though, silverwolf or whatever
Moonlight.
Last time i checked Linux version of SL was features behind the one for Windows.
I'm not denying that it is...just wondering.
I want it on linux. Flash should just die.
Last edited by lothodon on 12 Jul 2009 - 23:35
probably for compatibility, flash is pretty standard on every PC, silverlight not so much, im sure once it reaches that stage theyll switch
It takes a lot of work to change over all the crap they have going on on those sites. Give it time, I'm sure everything will eventually switch.
And have what instead?
Quite the contrary, i'd rather prefer it if somehow all web content could be delivered with rich flash/silverlight (or something similar) instead of a VERY silly markup language.
If that had been the case, we would be looking at www. from a very different angle by now. As it is now, we're "WOOOW"'ing at ajax (when it first came out), and you still want this to continue to be the de-facto standard?
No thanks, give me a chance to create a much better experince for my audience.
i think you hit the nail on the head there. general thoughts are that it's better than flash, however if nobody is using it, i'm pretty sure that's a path to failure.
You can't expect immediate massive market penetration.
People realize that Flash will be updated. MS has a temporary advantage because it built Silverlight after learning from Flash's mistakes, as it once did with IE vs. Netscape, but that advantage will soon be gone. The question is, can MS squeeze out even more performance or some new killer feature from Silverlight once Adobe catches up again?
+5
The question is, WILL adobe ever catch up again? As someone that uses around %50 of their current deployed software, i can tell you adobe is the next Quark, just going there a little faster.
So please support Silverlight on Symbian too. Thanks.
Ask that Microsoft personally, don't post it on this unrelated site that posts a lot of hear-say articles.
Is (they say) 100% compatible with Silverlight 1.0 (barely used on Internet) and in a very alpha stage to Silverlight 2.0.
meh
Maybe when they improve support for other platforms, yeah.
Maybe when they improve support for other platforms, yeah.
It supports OSX, and Moonlight supports Linux.
because .NET is still NOT cross platform (despite MS's claiming for ages) and Silverlight too (for Linux there is still no full counterpart even for Silverlight 2, not to mention the 3rd version)
Competition is good for consumers, but not always so good for developers who have no time to learn complete conglomerations of new technologies each half a year or so
Maybe you can just not use Flash and SL at all ...
I've seen really hot and functional web sites not using those.
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