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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."

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:History by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mod parent up, you fucking' philistines. Silverlight is the Zune of application frameworks.

  2. Re:History by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any web page plugin that exists outside of the normal flow of browser control and navigation history is a bad idea. Perhaps HTML5 will go some way to addressing this, which Microsoft will presumably get round to working towards some time around IE12 at their current rate of non-progress.

    One hilarious comment on MSDN about this, to paraphrase, was that is was "unfair that Microsoft was expected to keep modifying its browser to account for all these new standards competitors keep coming up with." and that they should "stop making new standards and give Microsoft a chance to implement existing ones." Or as I like to think of it, "stop the world, Microsoft needs to catch up."

  3. Features? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.