Microsoft's Silverlight: flashier than Flash [BT broadband office]

Microsoft's Silverlight: flashier than Flash

Posted 17 September 2007 at 8:24AM by Simon Dickson in Website development

Silverlight, Microsoft's response to the web's rekindled interest in Flash, has emerged from its beta testing phase, and is now a fully-fledged product. It's good news for web developers, and improves on some of Flash's inherent weaknesses - but there isn't a huge amount for end-users to get excited about. Not yet.

Microsoft describes Silverlight as 'a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.' Let me translate. It's available for Firefox and Safari, not just IE. It's available for Mac and Linux, not just Windows. And it uses more Microsoft-y, and in some respects, more standards-based methods to do pretty much what Flash does, plus a bit more.

Silverlight has the advantage of coming relatively late to the game, allowing it to learn from and build on technologies like XML and Ajax. Its material will be easier for search engines to index: when did you last see a Flash file in your Google results? It promises a better video experience, with 720p high-definition and full-screen capability. And naturally, it integrates particularly well with Microsoft's core technologies, like .NET and Windows Media.

Enough of the technical stuff... what can it do? Looking through the Silverlight website's showcase, there aren't too many things to get wildly excited about: you've seen most of this before, done in Flash. The best stuff is undoubtedly the video material, like the HD movies promoting the new Halo3 game. The rest is more proof-of-concept than anything else - but at least the concept is proven. There isn't much to show for it now, but this release certainly does point to a prettier, richer web to come.

Tags: adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, video, windows media

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Comments

1. At September 17, 2007 2:27 PM, anjanesh wrote:

Silverlight is a nice .net based platform that could steamroll its opposition.
Have been dabbling in it for quite some time and seems impressive. As with microsoft's other products it could be a slow starter but end up winning the race.It is particularly good in 3d vectoring . a late entrant but early leaner this product.

2. At September 17, 2007 8:59 PM, kim wrote:

urh, when will they learn.
we dont want to download another load of browser addons or another ms programme, with automatic updates, which no doubt hog system resource with unnecessary checking

3. At September 17, 2007 10:58 PM, Ryan Stewart wrote:

Hey Simon, just curious what inherent weaknesses in Flash that you think Silverlight addresses.

=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com

4. At September 18, 2007 8:24 AM, Dark Djinn wrote:

I saw a silverlight once.....I was in the hospital and someone was trying to bring me around....and repeatedly when people point ugly box/rectangular looking things at me .... cameras or what do you call them. Recently, we even have the silverlight technology on mobile phones. Microsoft IS coming into this gimmick late aren't they?

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