New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias 251
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from a story at El Reg about an early look at the Silverlight 4 beta:
"There are ... major changes to Silverlight's out-of-browser functionality, a loose equivalent to Adobe Systems' AIR runtime for Flash. Even when fully sandboxed, which means having the same permissions that would apply to a browser-hosted Silverlight applet, out-of-browser applications get an HTML control, custom window settings, and the ability to fire pop-up notifications. ... Unfortunately, some of these features are not what they first appear. The HTML control in Silverlight 4 is not a new embedded browser from Microsoft, but uses components from Internet Explorer on Windows, or Safari on the Mac, which means that the same content might render differently. The HTML control only works out-of-browser, and simply displays a blank space if browser-hosted. Clipboard support is text-only in the Silverlight 4 beta, though this could change for the full release. More seriously, COM automation is a Windows-only feature, introducing differentiation between the Mac and Windows implementations."
COM Automation = ActiveX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:History (Score:4, Informative)
Re:History (Score:4, Informative)
I believe netflix instant viewing is written on top of silverlight.
So what? Freedom of choice is good. (Score:3, Informative)
It has the ability to support older API's that aren't available on all platforms. Developers who care about maximum cross-platform reach just won't use them. On the flip-side, if it didn't allow interop with the old stuff, the current adopters would be pissed for obvious reasons.
This way the people creating Silverlight apps have freedom of choice and choice is good.
As far as IE goes, I have a product that integrates with IE. I looked closely at Webkit and Gecko. Neither one is very friendly to program against with .NET and the API's don't expose nearly as much automation capability as IE. If the maintainers of those browsers want developers to embed them in desktop apps as an alternative, they need to make an investment.
Why should Microsoft do it? As far as I know, anyone can create and distribute Silverlight components. If you want a good API for WPF/Silverlight for Gecko, talk to the Mozilla Foundation. I'd be glad to have it, but I'm not mad at Microsoft because it doesn't exist. (BTW, I am aware of GeckoFx and XulRunner. The API is very shallow compared to the IE COM interfaces.)
Re:History (Score:4, Informative)
Those are high profile, but use kind of drops off after that. Sharply.
It's great if you want to stream DRM content and don't want to use flash. Otherwise the java and flash plugins are more widely installed for the stuff that silverlight's trying to do. They're late to the party and except for DRM they don't really have a compelling story for why someone would want to use their technology.
Re:COM is windows only... (Score:1, Informative)
man, why can't we just learn something and use it for the next 20 years?
emacs
Re:Microsoft pollution at its best (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you should click on the "Learn what these numbers mean" link. Here, I'll do it for you:
The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don't have enough data, 0 is shown. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.
The number of searches in google has no objective relation to the number of deployments, for either flash or silverlight.
Farnsworth: "Bunk! Bunk, I say! Bring me a bag of Bigfoot's droppings, or shut up!"
Re:Anything about Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Moonlight. From the same folks who brought you Mono (and sharing much of the code), Moonlight is a free, open-source implementation of Silverlight runnable on Linux, *BSD, and so forth. It's under pretty heavy development, and like Mono itself tends to lag somewhat behind the MS version (unsurprisingly), but it's usable for many of the things that require Silverlight.
Download link (may also be in repositories): http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/ [go-mono.com]
Download for development version (2 beta 8): http://go-mono.com/moonlight-beta/ [go-mono.com]
Project page (including links to source): http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight [mono-project.com]
Re:History (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, some of us have to.
I'm a med student, and many of my lectures are viewed and reviewed at home via MediaSite, a Silverlight-based lecture management system from Sonicfoundry. While our lectures do play in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome with the Silverlight plugin, advanced features (such as the ability to play the lecture at whatever speed you wish) are only available in Internet Explorer. The crippling of Silverlight in competing browsers has forced me to return to IE.
Re:History (Score:1, Informative)
*And* make an editor like the Flash suite. That's one of the main reasons Flash succeeded: it's easy to use by designers, instead of coders. That's also why most Flash apps/websites suck.
Like the Expression Suite...
Re:History (Score:3, Informative)
Re:COM Automation = ActiveX (Score:1, Informative)
I'm puzzled though, because COM within Windows is a huge behemoth and the security implications for giving a web-based browser platform access to it, even if it is almost certainly limited, is going to be rather interesting.
It won't be very interesting at all, actually, because that's not what they're doing. These features are only for the out-of-browser version of Silverlight, when the app is executed with full trust on the desktop (i.e. not sandboxed within a browser). The summary wasn't really clear on that point.
Re:History (Score:4, Informative)
Try developing some stuff in Silverlight and see if you can claim using the above technologies is anywhere near as fast/easy/reliable/etc with a straight face. XHTML+CSS is a huge pain in the ass compared to Xaml. Javascript is slower, harder to maintain, and has less features then C# + .Net.
Except that those other "painful" technologies let other people actually use the apps published to the Web without necessarily having to invest in a PC and/or Windows. The purpose of Web sites was to have a universal system of interconnected data. Not to create a proprietary framework.
Even if Silverlight was the next best thing, the fact that it only works in Windows, marginally works in MacOS and just doesn't work at all elsewhere just rules it out.