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Silverlight On the Way To Linux
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."
While Windows is getting version 2, and the Mac is almost version 2, Linux is almost getting version 1. Awesome job MS.
With what is being achieved with Javascript and dynamic HTML, I see less and less need for technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. The only thing they really have going for them are the development environments. To see some of the games already implemented using plain old Javascript and HTML:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/games/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Standards anybody ?
I still think there should be a new standard that would obviate the need for flash, you can keep your silverlight and shove it.
MP3 Search Engine
Is there any reason not to think that this linux support will falter if Silverlight becomes widely used?
I can't say I have much love for Adobe and Flash, and I simply do not trust Microsoft, but if Linux support is going to be a key point-scoring device in the corporate pissing contests of today then I suppose a few good things might come of it. Let battle commence!
"For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project.
Translation: for two years, Microsoft has been using Novell to pretend they're not working on the Linux platform and aren't trying to embrace/extend it.
There ain't no way Silverlight will end up on my hard-drive. Having the Flash player is bad enough already.
I would have expected MS to write a new app like that in 100% managed code. I assumed that the Mono project would allow me to run most managed code, maybe with some effort (but not 2 years by two major software houses)
If so, then I would have expected it to "just run" under Mono.
One of my assumptions is wrong.
Unless there was an advantage to the lock in of flash why is there a reason to swap to another propitiatory product? Especially a linux clone that will always be behind Microsoft's offering.
If Silverlight was GPL and available for use by all then there might be a reason to adopt it over flash, but to just swap monopolies, no thanks.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I imagine how those developers working on Linux would be looked by the other MS employees. 'Oh, man, they're in the Dark side. They wear dark clothes, long hair, a beard, this can't be a good thing.'
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Moonlight is great but it's for Linux only. (Mono itself runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.) That reduces its suitability for making dynamic websites, because Mac and Windows users don't have a free browser plugin to run them with. They only have Microsoft's proprietary Silverlight plugin, and if you're going to require a binary-only plugin then you might as well just use Flash. So I think a Windows version of Moonlight would be cool; just as many people prefer to run the free Firefox browser even though Windows includes the proprietary Internet Explorer, so Moonlight could provide a free alternative for dynamic content.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This sounds more like a threat than a promise.
The future ain't what it used to be.
Ok, now it's official: with Silverlight, 2009 will sure be the year of Linux in desktop!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
"Web 2.0" seems to be nothing more than a non-stop assault of useless animations, personalized/targeted advertisements, and automatically-loading and starting background music to make up for poorly-organized sites. Animated .gif banners, despite often being gaudy, were not so offensive as scripts that scour for statistical data about me to offer localized advertisements. The addition of new, non-standardized software to each user's browser is the worst way to embrace "The Cloud"; it focuses on style alone while only marginally catering to the needs of companies and their clients.
Silverlight will see some adoption by Linux users who cannot bear to browse the internet without clicking monkeys to win iPods. I doubt it would hit even that level of popularity before its current audience becomes so fed up with its more obnoxious aspects. The process of understanding Silverlight will be akin to that of installing Flash:
1) Install Silverlight/Moonlight to be amazed by a few useful applications
2) Install advertisement blocking add-on to avoid the droves of awful applications
3) Tweak blocking black/white-lists until Silverlight loses its appeal
4) Remove Silverlight/Moonlight
On the fringe out here I'll stick to elinks where I can get a majority of my information while avoiding information overload.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
It's a real treat when you find a site that is static html. It's fast, clean, and refreshing. Flash and Ajax have their place, but more often than not they just irritate me. I'm tired of sites that peg my CPU and crash my browser.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but I'm sure Moonlight will only contribute to web bloat and add to my frustrations. And that is being generous and not bring up that MS is part of the equation.
I just hope this fails to catch on and people forget about it.
Now please add a XAML designer to Monodevelop so I can create Silverlight/Moonlight apps without Visual Studio. AJAX, etc... is too twitchy and cumbersome. Silverlight is a great way to make real apps that deploy over the web, and without having to waste time fighting with JS+HTML+CSS (Ugh!).
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
So let's keep the facts straight. Microsoft is trying to push a Flash-me-too Silverlight and invests. They also invest in other platform implementations via Novell. All customers use Flash.
I installed Silverlight on my Vista PC to view a boring Microsoft developer Website video. No one else uses the software. It is nice that provided Silverlight achieved the necessary market penetration which requires marketing investments of Microsoft, the Linux implementation Moonlight would be just one generation behind.
But more likely is that Microsoft will drop the Silverlight project and then you have open source developers who wasted their time on the moonlight implementation.
n/t
you had me at #!
what silverlight seeks to achieve that isnt currently offered in the web browsing experience?
I have flash in linux, and spend more time blocking it than enjoying it. i have javascript but also spend more time blocking that from shooting popups, redirects, and ads to me than actually enjoying it.
id enjoy java, but its been embraced and extended by MS to the point that no Java on the web works well, if at all in IcedTea (and icedtea explicitly meets all the requirements for java!)
activeX has turned into a security laughingstock...so perhaps this is why we're seeing silverlight?? if thats the case, i recommend linux stay the fuck away from it.
and imho, i think CSS has been the only tech offered to the web i've really enjoyed. the point of the web is to offer something everyone can share, and the megacorps seem to be diligently working to ensure we cant do that.
Good people go to bed earlier.
In capitalist America, Microsoft fucks you.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Just curious, is there an open source alternative with javascript/ajax and Ogg Vorbis available which can compete with flash and Silverlight? I mean free server components, free developer tools and free web plugins if needed. If not, why not?
*company releases software*
*People complain it's not on linux*
*company ports software to linux*
*people complain it's not OSS*
*company GPLs software*
*people complain it's not GPLv3*
*company forces a GPL2 or later licence*
*people complain that the company has a trademarked logo*
*company curls up in the corner, quietly sobbing*
*people complain that the design of the corner it's crying in isn't covered by creative commons*
http://svg.startpagina.nl
If we are looking at silverlight as a flash replacement, it is just a flash clone with no market share, so that makes it a non starter. Also, flash comes installed by default this days on every operating system and browser. Silverlight doesn't. That is enough of a show stopper on itself.
If on the other hand, we are looking at it as a way to code the client side of business apps with a rich interface using a strongly typed, compiled language, it could have some potential, except for one thing. No printing support. Printing support is essential for business apps and Silverlight doesn't provide it, at all.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. Major League Baseball, er, forget that one. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resume's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! FREE PORN!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Silverlight is not open source. Moonlight is. It is not a port, it is a sanctioned, but independent, rewrite, which is also related to advances in the Mono support for quite a few things that weren't there 2 years ago.
Those two words are contradictory: you need Microsoft's sanction (permission, as i understand) if you want to develop a 100% silverlight-compatible browser. (by the way, THAT's the difference between JavaScript and Silverlight). So how is it "independent"? Am I missing something here, my fellow slashdotters?
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
... sites using Silverlight
All five of them!? Really?
@neonux
thats been possible for about ten years using java. cross platform (more so than .net)
Why UNIX?
...and not even the godamn good courtesy of a reacharound. Unless it's for your wallet.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Let's face it, if (hypothetically) Silverlight happens to become a common-place tech used on the Internet, then we're better off with an implementation in Linux than without. Even if that means binary-only and proprietary.
It's not ideal sure, but few things are in life. Give people who want functionality the means to do so in their OS of choice. If others wish to stick to their own principles, that's fine. They don't have to install the plugin, and can choose to miss out on the next Olympics stream or ability to use an upcoming HD movie service or whatever. But if people want such features, then cool beans, they've got the choice now.
I don't trust Microsoft either, but I've given up complaining about missing functionality in Linux. I just take whatever I can get, proprietary or not (including Flash and NVIDIA drivers). MHO.
I'll be opening a site next year that will be static html. There are wonderful tools to make static pages that are easily updatable. The use of static html doesn't mean a site can't be fresh. Yes, I'll have some fancier stuff in an associated forum but even the user-contributed content will be edited and added to the main site as static html.
Why am I doing it this way? I think the key (well, one of the main keys) to a successful site is simply knowing your audience and giving them what they want and need. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "This is boring; I need to click somewhere else", then you need to employ fancier tools. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "I need to read this to see if it contains information I can use", then static html is fine and dandy. Because I'll be targeting an audience that is older and cares far more about good, updated, detailed information than about eye candy, static html for my core pages is the right choice.
Compare the user experience of loading a page with a Java applet vs. one with Flash or Silverlight. With the Java page, your browser is dead to the world while the JVM hauls itself up from the disk like a brontosaurus. With Flash or Silverlight, the control pops up quickly and the app loads.
This is one thing that I've always wondered about... why do .NET apps, even running through Mono, load so much faster than Java apps?
Serious question; I'm not really a fan of Java (although I use Eclipse a lot and I've written a few Java articles for IBM's developerWorks site), but I do like using the right tool for the job, whatever that job might be...
- chrish
I refuse to use Silverlight or Moonlight. Microsoft has no obligation to ensure 100% compatibility between Silverlight and Moonlight, and Moonlight will always be playing catchup to Silverlight. And once Microsoft destroyed Flash on Windows, there very little chance of it cooperating with Moonlight developers, there is no incentive anymore, and basically Silverlight will become another lock-in mechanism to lock people into Windows.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I've not seen any Silverlight outside a MS product.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I wish I knew the answer to your question, but I completely agree with you.
Every time I load a web page and my browser gives up on life for about 10 seconds only for me to see the java logo and another loading bar when it finally snaps to life, it irritates me to no end.
There's a reason I never continued any interaction with Java after I got out of the AP CS course I took in high school.
JavaScript, on the other hand, I will work with when it suits me. Just no web development.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
why didn't this make it onto slashdot then???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
So does the latest Moonlight version work with the Netflix "Watch Instantly" feature? If not then this isn't a very interesting announcement.
Having companies or people open source their software when not required (ie due to infringements or legislation) should always be treated as a generous act.
Apparently you use a web browser written in Java so you don't have to wait for the JVM to load and initialize?
- chrish
The source code for Moonlight is LGPL (the managed parts we wrote are MIT-X11 while the Silverlight Controls that Microsoft have released fall under MS-PL).
The main thing to do to port Moonlight to BSD is to implement an OSS backend for audio, other than that it should "Just Work" under BSD afaik.
re: "If Gnash is too limited, stick to the minimum version of Flash that supports the feature you need...unless you're extremely advanced, that version should be available on all major platforms."
Actually, it's most practical to go with the H.264 version of Player 9, which 90% of consumers successfully installed into their browsers within its first nine months:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
If you're going live in December, clientside support on "major platforms" should be up above 95% by then.
Last month's Player 10, with its pixel-manipulation and P2P and all, is already used on some early-adopter sites, but will be mainstream by next summer.
The interesting thing is mobile. Adobe Flash Player is now moving to a single coding profile across devices of all form-factors... there will still be profiles of device capability, but not of runtime codebase. The goal is predictable capability across all display screens. It will take time and work to get there, but it's a good goal.
jd/adobe
http://acko.net/files/bacon/animation-demo.html
This demo works in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. What's more, the animations are smooth and beautiful in Chrome thanks to it's v8 Javascript engine. Now we just need to get people weaned from IE6.
I just spend a little time reading thought the MS web site, and it never really says!
WTF is Silverlight?
Is it some web server? or a browser? or some scripting language?
I don't get it, and I don't feel like downloading it and installing it to find out, or watching there video.
Am I the only one confused by all this meaningless marketing speak?
I mean it talks about XML and features, but never says what the hell the damb thing is!!!!
Did I miss the memo on this somewhere?
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso