Has Microsoft matched Flash with Silverlight 3? Traditionally, version 3.0 is the moment when everything comes together for Microsoft. Has the company pulled this off with Silverlight 3.0, the beta of which was announced today here at Mix 09 in Las Vegas? The list of new features is impressive, although behind almost every announcement, you can sense Microsoft looking …
Adobe and Microsoft join in with the standardisation of Javcascript and stop its development in its tracks.
Now they are both fighting over who has rights to your browser to do what Javascript would have been able to do with its eyes shut if they hadnt got 'involved'. Quell surprise!
Next time I want to turn my computer into a heap of useless junk remind me to install MS and Adobe on it.
I think the most interesting thing about the Flash vs Silverlight debate is still the huge amount of Microsofts own websites and apps that are still using flash. The lastest live messenger uses flash for winks and msn videos in the UK is still flash video..
Without is house developement how can they expect third party development.
Tom, I can't be entirely certain, but your counter-factual hypothesis appears to be that Javascript, had it continued to be developed sans standards, would by now be able to do all the things Silverlight 3.0 can: complex GUI interfaces with dynamically-rendered controls; GPU-accelerated 3D graphics; H264 video decoding; allow developers to write Rich Internet Applications in Ruby, Python, C#, F#, Scheme or any other CLR-compliant language...
I disagree. I think that in any eventuality, Javascript was always going to end up as a very powerful but also horribly messy cobbled together scripting language which regularly got stretched far beyond its intended use by some very talented individuals. But it was never going to remove the need for Flash or Silverlight.
... and that is to ABOLISH it altogether.
OK, flash has its uses, but annoyances on MOST web pages are not one of them.
Is silverlight aiming to be MORE or LESS annoying than flash? Because by far the best browser enhancement at the moment would be to extend the "do not display animated GIFs" option so that it blocks flash and objects too.
OK, so flashblock on firefox already does that ... but it misses animations performed by javascript and objects.
We desperately need to be able to block the lot of them ... and better still, lets have some INTELLIGENT web designers who understand that these flash and similar annoyances should be used only when needed rather than being used for the sake of it.
Microsoft are FINALLY supporting AVC (though which profile/level?) amongst other things, but where is cross-platform support? Moonlight with its dependency on a MS supplied DRM-less codec pack and incompatibility with existing sites is not an acceptable solution.
Microsoft have a long track record of paying lip service to cross platform only to pull the rug when it suits them. Witness what they did with IE for Unix and numerous, Unix Services For Windows and many other examples. MS could easily dump support for the codecs at any time they felt like and they probably will. At the least they will ensure that the Silverlight is such a fast moving target and tied up with proprietary technologies that there is no possibility of keeping up.
I think some things about Silverlight are nice, for example the tools are better than JavaFX and performance is good. But tying yourself to Microsoft operating systems is horribly shortsighted.
The video component isn't needed(remember when they'd actually embed a decent quality video, instead of a crappy, reduced resolution Flash version?) and the interactive component already existed in Java - which, irregardless of its flaws, was never abused anywhere near as much as Flash.
Flames, because they can just BURN IN HELL!
It's obviously passed you by completely that Silverlight (The MS variant, not Moonlight - which is sponsored by Novell and MS) is near feature-identical on MacOSX. And by the way describing Moonlight as "not an acceptable solution" - sure, it's not compatible with all sites, because it's feature-equivalent to Silverlight 1..0.
I hate to burst your bubble, but have you seen the breakdown of which OS's are used in web access statistics? Linux and its variants do not account for much. Try running a business and justifying pouring millions into supporting it, please, just try.
You are aware that flash is a proprietary extension of Javascript and Adobe have kindly handed over the code to Mozilla so very soon Firefox will have the ability to run javascrript and open vector graphics etc as well as flash? go look up tamarin and tracemonkey.
And as for Flash being awsome - you may think so - I use flashblock.
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