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New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias
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."
For those not up to speed on the windows acronyms, COM automation is just another word for ActiveX. It's exactly the same thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLE_Automation#cite_ref-5
Anybody who didn't see this coming when MS came out hard about the "amazing cross compatibility besting Adobe!" a few years ago is insane. This is the same old shit they have pulled time and time again. At least they let the cat out of the bag before this needless plug-in gained any real traction. And no I'm no Flash fan. Adobe treats us like dogs too.
Pope discovered to be Catholic
Bears recorded shitting in woods.
It's a trap!
/Wait... am I late? I'm always late to these things. It WAS a trap. The next one is not a trap though. The next one will be just fine. Trust me.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I really want to run Silverlight in Ubuntu! Well, no that was sarcasm, but Linux should be mentioned when one talks about cross comparability. We should not allow the meme to emerge that the only options are Mac or windows.
Is anyone actually surprised that it has a Windows bias?
Isn't the idea to wait to lock in until, oh, at least 10% of the population is actually using your product?
How surprising that MS couldn't hold off that long.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
...thank God.
Only Microsoft has the peculiar genius that allows them to take a relatively straightforward concept (reference counting/smart pointers) add a totally over-the-top, incomprehensible library that was designed around the limitations of the broken template support in VC6 (ATL), then totally abandon it for "teh new shiny" because you lost a court case against Sun (.net).
I have written a *lot* of code in ATL, and I regret practically every moment of it; I liked the idea of COM/ActiveX, it's actually a really cool concept, and it even seemed to have an awesome future (all these COM objects that could talk to each other...Excel could control my toaster via my custom ActiveX dll) but suddenly it became all about the web and the era of a component-laden operating system ended before it really ever began. So for that I slogged through a bunch of ATL books, got to the point where I thought I knew how it all worked, and then all Microsoft wanted talk about was C# and .net.
Obviously this is some kind of mistake. Miguel assured all us Linux users that Microsoft was a changed company, they would NEVER do something like this! Surely Moonlight would be 100% compatible with Silverlight and Linux would be considered a tier 1 platform!
He wouldn't have lied, would he?
This is from the folks who claim linux support, but then refuse to supply the DRM package needed to actually use it.
Either you want to compete with Flash or you want to use this to promote windows, you can't have it both ways.
COM is a Windows technology, but right before this story was posted I was watching a video from Channel 9 where they said they were looking at options for using Applescript on Mac to provide similar features. More info here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Joe-Stegman-Silverlight-4-Out-of-Browser-Evolves/
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.)
Each time I read about silverlight I get angry. Why won't Microsoft invest time and energy making IE html5 compliant instead of promoting this f*** product that nobody wants anyway. I mean, look at the competition for god sake. IE is stuck with Javascript 1.5 since November 2000. Man we are now 9 years since Ms has updated its Javascript engine. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, name it, all have javascript support almost if not ready for ECMAScript 5.
What is comforting in a way is the low deployment of silverlight. Google can give us a slight idea : http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=adobe%20flash%2Cmicrosoft%20silverlight&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q
I know at least that it is not deployed at work : 20,000 less pcs for Microsoft + the 2 mine at home.
Microsoft today announced the release of version 4.0 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. 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 resumé’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
From TFA:
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.
The difference in rendering between IE on Windows and Safari on Macosx is a reality, whether silverlight is involved or not. The purpose of the HTML Control is to allow scenarios dependent on the HTML Bridge, the part of silverlight that blurs the lines and allows communication between the html dom + javascript and C# code, to run correctly when the app is hosted out of the browser. It's essentially a crutch to allow developers that want to use siverlight a way to leverage existing investments in web application development.
More seriously, COM automation is a Windows-only feature, introducing differentiation between the Mac and Windows implementations. Since cross-platform Mac and Windows is a key Silverlight feature, it is curious that Microsoft has now decided to make it platform-specific in such an important respect. Microsoft Office and parts of the Windows API have a COM interface, so access to COM makes Silverlight a much more capable client.
This is a fairly obscure feature, and I'm fairly surprised that it was included at all, but doubt it'll be of use to the vast majority of current and future silverlight developers out there. Like the html control, it's a crutch, to allow developers that want to use silverlight a way to leverage existing investments. The mantra I've heard out of the silverlight team is to focus on unblocking customer scenarios (scenarios they cannot unblock themselves) without compromising the overall feature goals (like keeping the runtime download small).
Nevertheless, Silverlight has crossed a threshold. It is now a runtime that has extended functionality only on Windows. That will not help Microsoft win developers from Adobe AIR, which has the same features on both Mac and Windows.
I don't think it'll matter. Any developer that is seriously considering using silverlight over Adobe AIR, but is then persuaded not to because Silverlight's Trusted Out-Of-Browser scenario has COM support on Windows and not on Mac is "Doing It Wrong". It's an edge case feature that doesn't affect Silverlight's over all "Cross-Platforminess".
Flame On.
So far, the only feature in TFS that I can see as having "Windows bias" is ActiveX support. Which is kinda not surprising (I mean, who doesn't know that ActiveX is "that evil Windows thing" - even people who don't even understand what it is and how it works?). Qt also has an ActiveX support module, and it doesn't make it any less cross-platform - no-one forces you to use it. Same applies here.
Think about it:
Why would I want to help MS get more market share when it comes to the delivery of on-line multimedia? I'm sure if MS gets a large percentage of the market, they would shiv me in the back by pulling codec support from the Linux version or sabotaging it in some other manor.
We're talking about the same company that tried to lock out free audio codecs from PMPs a wile back to screw free software users.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/accidental_music_monopoly_bid/
I'm happy to stick with Flash. It may be closed source, but at least it isn't made by (or under the control of) a company that regularly goes out of its way to screw people over.
That being said, I'm sure MS could buy Adobe, so a free solution would still be much better/reliable than flash.
That would explain why it sucks so bad. Has to recalibrate every 10 or 15 minutes because my connection speed has diminished.
Yeah, I have crappy DSL, but Hulu manages to deal with it much better than Netflix via Silverlight..
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
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.
So on the Mac it'll use Webkit, which means it'll render correctly. On Windows it'll use IE, which means... okay, anyone who's done any web development at all knows what that means.
I guess I'm not seeing the "pro-Windows bias" here - it looks like an anti-Windows bias to me!
#DeleteChrome
Actually, I'm not on crack. The Slashdot moderate-the-moment-you-change-the-dropdown-box UI, however, might be. imma go poke preferences and see if that can be turned off....
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
WTF? If I'm viewing something on my Mac, I want it to use Safari components, so it will behave like I'm used to on the Mac. If I'm viewing the same thing on Windows, I want it to use IE components, so it will behave like I'm used to on Windows. This is a good thing.
Microsoft software quality again.
Seriously, is anyone not payed by microsoft using this Silverlight stuff?
Who would have thought, Microsoft and platform lock-in?
Example: http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/maproom :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias
Oh the shock!!!!! Who would ever of expected Microsoft to pull a low-down dirty trick like that?
This is sarcasm. I'm being sarcastic.
When did Mac OSX get IE 6, 7 and 8?
Last I saw was IE 5.5.
I really don't see why everybody is acting like the sky is falling over this. The level of cross platform compatibility is not changing in any significant way. Virtually nobody is going to use the Windows only com automation. It only works in a full trust out of browser Silverlight app. 99.5% of Silverlight use is in browser and of that remaining 0.5% most are partial trust apps. I can't think of why somebody with these requirements wouldn't just use WPF honestly.
Here's a more comprehensive listing of the changes to come.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
>> Why won't Microsoft invest time and energy making IE html5 compliant
Looks like they will bring it closer to compliance in IE9.
Silverlight exists because HTML5 and Flash suck ass as a development platform if you want to develop desktop-class applications and deploy them over the web. I'm sorry, that's just a fact of life. Just look at Google Docs. It will never be full fidelity until it is rebuilt on top of the platform actually designed to run applications, not just display content.
Sun had a tremendous lead with Java, but somehow they managed to fuck up every single thing they needed to do to succeed. Microsoft fucked up the first three versions already, as they typically do, now with version 4 coming out I expect a good product, and good tooling around the SDK to go with it.
The only shitty bit about Silverlight from technological standpoint is that it relies on XAML. If there ever was an idea that deserved to be strangled in its infancy, that would be XAML. Other than that, SL provides a high performance (faster than Java, not to mention Javascript, and with lower memory footprint), garbage collected runtime, a contemporary object-oriented language (with functional bits tastily thrown in over the past couple of years), GPU accelerated media decoding and drawing, etc, etc.
If Google released something like this, everyone would be shitting their pants in ecstasy. Think about it, in SL there's NOTHING preventing you from building a full-fidelity equivalent of Word or Excel, for example. Anything you can do in managed code on the desktop (and that's a heck of a lot), you can do in Silverlight just as well. And it will run on both PC and Mac.
Instead, everyone will continue hacking browsers into submission ad nauseam. I've spent years of my life doing just that, and I want those years back.
This just typical MS standard operating procedure. The really insidious thing is how Silverlight was introduced first as a video streaming platform. Then earlier this year MS now says that it is a web platform. So MS was unable to to completely extend and embrace users with IE. So now they are locking people in with Silverlight. You can use other browsers so long as you use Windows...:(. So in a sense this a stalling maneuver to give MS more time to capture more cloud computing users before Google Chrome & Linux has time to win a big share of the windows market.
This is a fairly obscure feature, and I'm fairly surprised that it was included at all, but doubt it'll be of use to the vast majority of current and future silverlight developers out there....
I don't think it'll matter. Any developer that is seriously considering using silverlight over Adobe AIR, but is then persuaded not to because Silverlight's Trusted Out-Of-Browser scenario has COM support on Windows and not on Mac is "Doing It Wrong".
Then why on earth put any effort forth on this? Has the rest of Silverlight achieved such a state of enlightenment nothing remains to be worked on?
The very fact this is in there is handing sharp weapons to those constantly on the lookout for Microsoft transgressions, real or imagined. The fact that it also will not help real-world developers, make it doubly stupid to put forth.
On a side note I am happy to report I was able to remove the last instance of Silverlight from my house, thanks to Netflix PS3 streaming. With both the 360 and the PS3 supporting this now, and the PS3 being at least a partial media system for many people thanks to the Blu-Ray player, how much life does SIlverlight really have left?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Answer me this: does explorer continue to show ONLY windows partitions? I'm
sure many of you will chime in, oh you can add such-and-such and it will
display ext3/ext4 and so on; to you people, I say Whoosh
I'm talking about out-of-the-box behavior. Does it continue this denial that
other partitions (formed by other OS's) are there, and have data in them that
I may want to access while in Windows? Puh-lease, if I'm paying for the
Premium Edition, I want Premium Edition, not clearance corner bargain
bin Norton wannabe tunnel-vision hey-its-the-90's file managers. So
Silverlight's got a Windows Bias? Yawn.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Either the GP was talking bollocks or what they saw were spoofed UA strings. The only way to run IE 6+ on OS X is through a VM. Or possibly Wine/Crossover, although I doubt you could get IE and Silverlight to work under Wine.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Out of curiousity, what don't you like about XAML?
I'm not saying I'm in love with it myself, but I'm curious about your angle because I agree with a lot of the rest of what you had to say there and I'm wondering if there's something I missed.
The full .Net framework has a lot of hacks to support COM. Your STA running managed code can get preempted at any time to Release COM objects behind RCWs that get garbage collected. This can cause interesting stress bugs. It gets even worse when an RCW around an STA gets finalized on the finalizer thread. That blocks the finalizer thread, because it waits for .Net to Release the COM object on the original STA thread. If the STA thread is in a wait state, you can hang the finalizer thread. Another big issue is around supplying alternative credentials for DCOM. .Net has no exposure of the CoCreateInstanceEx API that allows you to specify alternative credentials. Even if you wrap it yourself, you have to make sure you call CoSetProxyBlanket before you do any calls - and .Net does QueryInterface under the hood for you, and you have to make sure CoSetProxyBlanket is called again, then the simple programming interface of .Net becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
They were supposed to get away from COM in the Silverlight versions. Now the waters are even muddier, because WPF is still supported on the Full version of the CLR.
Like, Duh!!!!
Does anyone not using Windows actually use Silverlight? To me this sounds like .NET or IE have a Windows bias.
If anything, it's good that all the crap is quarantined together and doesn't spread to become a web standard.
While Moonlight might be a layer on top of Mono, perhaps Wine could provide the Win32-specific COM integration required here for 100% compatibility?
> So Netflix, the Olympics and the US Presidential Inauguration aren't high profile enough for you?
Erm, no.
1) I don't use Netflix, thank you. Maybe after I watch the bazillions of videos on the net. Hah, who knows?
2) The Olympics are old now. Do you think Silverwhatever will be around on the next?
3) I have my own President, thank you. And it's a lot funnier with about 1/5th of Obama's study years... think about the savings!
> Just because you have a seething inner hatred towards MS doesn't mean no one uses their technology.
Just because M$ is incompetent don't expect to be able to blame their faults on some primeval emotion. I don't like M$, as it turned to be, but I had no such feelings back then... they were simply morons. Now they're like Audrey from the Little Shop of Horrors: they demand a company every few days...
Stop arranging excuses and work! Make the products good. M$ can do it, they do reasonable hardware (albeit expensive). Why must they rely on emotional tactics to do software (bullying, complaining they are hated etc.)
Stop complaining and achieve success by W-O-R-K-I-N-G!
From that alone, you'll see much of the hate disappear. Do you know someone that hates Sun? Well, I don't -- even though nobody is throwing a party for them --> GET A CLUE!
So Netflix, the Olympics and the US Presidential Inauguration aren't high profile enough for you? Just because you have a seething inner hatred towards MS doesn't mean no one uses their technology.
Who cares? Compare that to the other 99.999% of sites running Flash.
Also mind you that there are other human beings living on earth that are *NOT* Americans.
>Instead, everyone will continue hacking browsers into submission ad nauseam..
I would mod you up if I could. Trying to design an interface in HTML + css + javascript is really, really hard. But even if I agree with you on this, I don't think that the solution is Silverlight. We have to have better standards instead of proprietary technology. Few people will win with the Microsoft approach, we will be stuck in another Microsoft prison. A prison with golden bars maybe but still no liberty.
Your STA running managed code can get preempted at any time to Release COM objects behind RCWs that get garbage collected. This can cause interesting stress bugs. It gets even worse when an RCW around an STA gets finalized on the finalizer thread. That blocks the finalizer thread, because it waits for .Net to Release the COM object on the original STA thread. If the STA thread is in a wait state, you can hang the finalizer thread. Another big issue is around supplying alternative credentials for DCOM. .Net has no exposure of the CoCreateInstanceEx API that allows you to specify alternative credentials. Even if you wrap it yourself, you have to make sure you call CoSetProxyBlanket before you do any calls - and .Net does QueryInterface under the hood for you, and you have to make sure CoSetProxyBlanket is called again, then the simple programming interface of .Net becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
They were supposed to get away from COM in the Silverlight versions. Now the waters are even muddier, because WPF is still supported on the Full version of the CLR.
...
What?
(And this is why I'm not a Microsoft developer.)
Anything you can do in managed code on the desktop (and that's a heck of a lot), you can do in Silverlight just as well.
Maybe someone builds a decent browser with it some day.
The whole idea of a technology like silverlight is to be consistent across all platforms.
I can't see it ever gaining any real traction until Microsoft can fix such fundamental defects.
There is this think called "Browser", right?
Which is build to display HTML, right?
And Microsoft invented some stuff nobody wants, that can do *additonal* stuff in that Browser. That was pretty bad to begin with.
And now they want to use *that* to do HMTL, but that feature is broken?
I think I have to get out of IT before the stuff blows up.
In 5 years or so you will open up IE, that starts a sSlverlight OS, that starts a VMWare machine, that starts an embedded version of Windows, that starts a sandboxes version of another IE to display a 404 Error.
I just uninstalled novell moonlight from firefox. I never used it anyways. Anything microsoft has control over ends up being a bad thing. I'm so sick of their endless lock-in games. When your in business to make money and to keep people under your thumb you get Microsoft. I can only hope that one day enough people will see this for Microsoft to come tumbling down.
It's not how many people use silverlight, I could care less if some myspace user's crappy animation doesn't work, but if entire sites feature content in that format exclusively to provide content, for example YouTube, Amazon, eBay, etc, then users will have no choice but to install the new plugin to keep using that site. Users can get cornered if MS throws around cash buckets. I'm not saying this will come true (especially YouTube using it) but if enough people install it, that could snowball into a lot more sites using the plugin, especially if MS puts cash behind spin and FUD to market this to media conglomerates.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
Just use Google's Chrome Frame. Problem solved!
No, I will not work for your startup
My point exactly. Why deal with this crap when there are more straightforward alternatives to do interop?