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New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias

Posted by Soulskill on from the open-is-as-open-does dept.

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."

2 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what? Freedom of choice is good. by h4rr4r · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    When you picked .Net you decided against portability. The maintainers of those browsers are not interested in you using their work to make a not portable app. Why should they be?

    More over if you used IE for display in your app we can all rest assured nothing of value was lost for those of us who cannot run it. I have never seen a decent app that did this and am very sure I never will.

  2. Re:History by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Javascript is the crappiest language to do what you are attempting to do on the web. Every time I hear someone talking about javascript + HTML 5 +Canvas I want to rip their head off and shit down their neck.

    If the OSS folks are so great at making standards, then why the fuck haven't they replaced the attack vector, POS VBA wanna-be Javascript with something good?