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Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files."
Moonlight is a neat project and Silverlight looks interesting, Flash works. But why can't an open, rich experience, open standards solution for building web sites emerge? Surely that would be better for web site developers and consumers.
If Adobe is finally taking Linux seriously, it's because they are afraid of Microsoft. Best outcome we can have is Adobe and MS each taking a 50% share of this market. We'll reap the benefits, regardless of OS of choice.
XmlHttpRequest, the 'X' in AJAX, started life as a Microsoft only, proprietary ActiveX object back in IE5.
Given that, your post doesn't really make sense.
Maybe not
Don't get me wrong, I think its cool that projects like this exist and I am not going to criticize anyone for spending time working on it.
But Silverlight really seems like a solution in search of a problem. Flash provides nice interactivity at the cost of an annoying plugin, and HTML5 is quickly catching up and should be the long term method of constructing web apps.
The only advantage of Silverlight seems to be the unified language for both backend and content, but that doesn't seem compelling to me. Anyone here using Silverlight for anything interesting that couldn't be done in Flash or HTML?
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
short memory you have there. before MS started working on silver light a decent flash player on linux was but a pipe dream. say what you want about them, but anything MS takes an interest in ends up with savage competition that benefits us all.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There must be a non-ActiveX version of the page if it works on Macs... keep at it! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And I don't see anything in Silverlight that isn't similarly addressed by HTML5. Ergo, HTML5 is superior for its standardization, true cross-platform support, and competing implementations that can meet the needs of many different ideals.
For the record, I don't have anything against people such as yourself who work at Microsoft. Many people who work there are great people. But from the inside looking out, you can't see the forest through the trees. You especially can't see the massive amount of harm and disrespect your company is paying the industry. And that harm is why I can't stand Microsoft anymore. Mr. Wilson can complain about negativity all he wants, but he refuses to recognize the trail of broken promises he and your company have given to the industry.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's crystal-clear:
XmlHttpRequest is a "de facto" standard, yes. It was introduced by Microsoft, yes (it was not intended for AJAX, though), and IE implements it right by definition.
On the other hand, it's not possible to do AJAX if if the DOM and every thing else in the browser is not standards conformant, and boy, Microsoft has troubles doing that! It's the same old problem with JavaScript, only much worse.
Makes sense now?
Excellent point. If Silverlight took off and Adobe became an "also ran" there would be a patent-protected, copyrighted "Silverlight 3" that could not run on non-M$ operating systems.
It is not only that in practical terms it doesn't work. There is something else here. If you look at the press release for the Moonlight 1.0 release, they tell you about a number of things Microsoft had to do to allow this to happen. For example, releasing their codecs for linux, providing patent indemnification, releasing some microsoft code as open source.
This tells you that Microsoft has complete control over Moonlight in terms of allowing it to progress or not. I am sure that for Moonlight 2.0 there will be another bunch of things that Microsoft will need to do (or not) if they decide to make it happen.
So what do we have? a free implementation of a non industry standard solution that can't exist without the approval from Microsoft.
Moonlight is just meant for the MS marketing drones to be able to tick the box when users ask about multiplatform.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Any other reasons why you'd want Silverlight?
Say it with me, "Monopolies are bad."
Just because it's Microsoft doesn't make it evil. What's truly evil is being forced to rely on something like Flash to bring you content--no matter what.
Am I the only person dismayed by the fact that flash video is *so* horrible, you can't full screen youtube's HD stuff on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 machine?
I mean, FFS, Adobe had Flash ready for the iPhone in months.... But we can't even get a native x64 version of it on ANY OS. If Microsoft can force some swift kicks in Adobe's ass (which they should for forcing me to download a damned plugin to save to PDF in Office 2007 anyway) and vice-versa, I see nothing but good things on the road ahead.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.