Microsoft Prefers Flash To Silverlight

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft still has not adopted Silverlight, and uses Flash all over its websites. 'Despite all the controversy over Microsoft using Silverlight to take over the rich internet market from Adobe Flash, the software giant seems to be not even trying. In fact, even most Microsoft web sites are using Flash instead of Silverlight.'"

Comments

It's only a matter of time....

[TomHandy]

I'm pretty sure I read that Microsoft is in the middle of migrating over to Silverlight for most of their sites, since it is one of their biggest platforms for promoting and getting people to install it. I think the same article said the Olympics site was also going to be a big showcase for Silverlight.

I have to admit, some of the Silverlight sites I've seen so far have actually been kind of cool - the one that sticks out to me is the Hard Rock Memorabilia site at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Thank God, I hate the obtrusive advertising.

[urbanriot]

I'll never adopt Silverlight, or at least I'll wait until the bitter end (probably like I did with Macromedia Flash), mainly because I'm sick and tired of seeing their obtrusive "Install Silverlight" popup that you're forced to view every time you go onto their web site with Internet Explorer. That alone makes me hate it, and raises my... annoyance with Microsoft.

Re:re-development cost

[BenoitRen]

They have existing flash code and developers, why would they re-write and re-train?

To promote their product?

Give it some time before making these stupid accusations.

Silverlight has been released more than a year ago already. They have had quite some time already, especially for a company with massive resources.

Adobe is Poised to Lose It

[bxwatso]

IMO, Adobe is actively against MS. Acrobat is still not fully Vista compatible. Flash crashes my IE7 daily, and there are no x64 plans that I know of (they made a vague announcement a long time ago).

Silverlight works just fine on my web site and doesn't crash anything. MS is pushing a lot of content providers to try Silverlight, so the install base should go up this summer.

MS lost its edge in the OS war through complacency and slow roll-out performance. I see Adobe doing the same with Flash.

Re:Why not 3D for the web?

[Dragonshed]

Silverlight will have 3D eventually. The biggest problem to get around is supporting hardware acceleration equally across the targeted platforms.

I spoke with one of the devs working on SL, and he told me the issue is gaining access to the accelerated rendering devices. Most if not all browsers don't let plugins create a 3d surface (Maybe you can do this with ActiveX in IE *shrug*), so it'll involve a fair amount of hackery to get this working uniformly on all their targeted platforms. There are some interesting features planned post 2.0, but thats for Microsoft to divulge when they're ready.

It's interesting (but not surprising) that noone here pointed out that flash is far superior to silverlight 1.0 and 1.0 is the only version that allows sites to go live to end users.

For those who don't know, 1.0 is essentially a 2d-and-video compositor with a relatively nice API, but programable only using javascript, which depending on what you're doing can get really slow really fast.

Actionscript is much faster than javascript, and with flex is much easier to use imo. But (again imo) C# trumps both.

Silverlight 2.0 is in beta, with beta 2 coming sometime soon, and that's the tech most MS/C# web developers are interested in using. A cut down .NET runtime with relevant APIs and zero fat. The install footprint is a little over 4megs and thats not likely to change much until version.next.

If java applets were seemless with a 4meg footprint that installs in 20 seconds, it would've stolen the application programming market long ago. Flash has steadily gotten better instead, but again, I think C# is better :)

Flame on.
-DS

Re:Silverlight is insignificant

[ozmanjusri]

What makes you think Flash will be more successful than Java?

I said it was threatening, not that it would be successful.

Those of us who were around then will remember that Microsoft mounted a sustained attack on Java, and deliberately crippled it's multi-platform capabilities. I'm sure they will try the same with Flash.