Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1
superapecommando writes "The richest RIA platforms today (and for the foreseeable future) come from clashing titans Adobe and Microsoft, whose Flash and Silverlight platforms both combine excellent tools for developers and designers, broad client support, strong support for server-side technologies, digital rights management capabilities, and the ability to satisfy use cases as varied as enterprise dashboards, live video streaming, and online games. And each has spawned new updates, to Flash 10.1/AIR 2 and Silverlight 4 respectively, which put them on a near-level playing field. Which one should you choose?"
Insert your own joke here.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Which one should you choose?
The one with the largest tits? No, wait, that's for assistants.
I don't fricking care as long as the page works? Yep, that's the one for the devs.
Neither.
I would go with Flash just because most people have it. The install base is substantially higher than silverlight.
Ummm ... how are either of the above better than WebGL + natively JIT compiled Javascript ?
Neither one. Given the prices they are asking, particularly for upgrades after they have their hooks into you. You might as well sign over a significant percentage of your annual income over to their CEO's retirement package as you become an indentured developer.
Better for the community to seek and develop Open Source Solutions with equivalent functionality via web service architectures. Given the way the global economy and the environment upon which it is based is headed, we need cheaper and more efficient solutions, not ever more expensive ones that lock developers in.
Which one should you choose?
HTML 5. Until that's finalized, I luckily don't require any of the features these two hold as RIAs (like Video). And, if I had the need for video, I would only evaluate these two on their video capabilities and only use it for that component on my content. And since neither of them list Ogg Theora in their codecs on this review and that's what browsers I care about support so far in HTML 5, I'd have to weigh storing videos in multiple codecs ... everyone's really done such a good job of making me just not want to think about video right now as a web developer. I guess I suffer from video anxiety.
Side note: Anyone else find that these *world sites release similar yet different articles daily?
My work here is dung.
closed standards are clumsy to me.
With version 9, IE will also support open standards nicely.
Silverlight and Flash only work decently when you're in a closed environment; big company where everybody is guaranteed to have the same system.
I know Silverlight and Flash are able to do some things HTML5etc can't do (yet?), but part of those are a bad idea anyway (DRM).
Choose the one that works on all mobile devices including iPads and iPhones.
Firefox 3 doesn't support WebGL, and Firefox 4 isn't due out until November according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's article about Safari doesn't even mention WebGL. Requiring Internet Explorer users to install Chrome Frame for its WebGL and JavaScript engine is just as much a logistical barrier as requiring them to install Silverlight.
Neither.......HTML5......no plugins to crash or cause instability. As long as the browser supports HTML5 it all good open source, none of this proprietary crap like Silverlight and Flash!! Been wanting to see flash go away for years and then Microsoft came out with Silverlight and its just another plugin you have to worry about and keep updated. HTML5 for everyone!! All flash is good for is advertisements and youporn sites.
Which one should you choose?
I know which choice I'm making - HTML5.
I know there is a Java bias here, but as a Swing developer JavaFX really rocks. I like that I can do the same things as Adobe and Microsoft, but code in my preferred language. The enterprise tools are coming out now, but the ability to animate objects easily makes you think out of the box for some applications. If you are a Java guy, check it out!
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
I know the W3C is slow, but even they can't take 15 years to complete a spec I should hope. HTML 4 was completed in 3 years, as was HTML 3. (2 and 1 I don't believe where ever formalized). If they do take that long then they will have long since ceased to be relevant.
This is like comparing shit with corn in it, vs. shit with peanuts in it. Which one would *you* rather eat?
C|N>K
I dislike adobe for a few reasons, but Microsoft constantly proves their willingness to ignore security flaws and patch out good features and patch in bad things. They almost always do it in such a way as to leave the core product usable, but I don't like it.
Given what I know now, I'll take Flash in a choice purely between the two.
Sounds like it came straight from a magazine that worships only those spending on ads. I vote neither, but rather to look forward and leave the fossils for future archaeologists to study or laugh about. Seriously, just because it's an ad for both MS and Adobe doesn't mean it isn't an ad.
Plain old HTML plus AJAX where required, plus whatever parts of HTML5 are working now = superior functionality when compared to Flash/Silverlight, except if you are youtube or a pornsite.
At the moment it's better to wait than to use any of those two. They both have no long-term future.
However if you only have a short term project and you really need something _now_, Flash is just somewhat more availiable.
HTML 5
Viewing HTML5 properly on Windows requires either A. installing the Google Chrome Frame BHO for Internet Explorer or B. installing another web browser. I'd estimate that far more PC users have Flash Player installed than Chrome Frame.
In my opinion, cross-platform compatibility is of the utmost importance here. I don't have anything in particular against windows, but I have a mix of windows and linux machines and it really limits my choices when some technology refuses to support one or the other. There are relatively few cases of this in the real world, but unfortunately MS Silverlight is one of them.
...in the near future. This means that all Windows (Windows Phone 7, whatever success the platform will actually have) -based development is going to happen in Silverlight. Now WPF/SL is not such a bad platform, Reactive Extensions are a very advanced application of computer science (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3687) that is quite powerful once one learns how to use it, and the dependency property mechanism gives is very flexible and allows to move lots of trivial logic in the page markup rather than in the callbacks code.
So if one is interested in building an application that can be ported to WP7 and moved between the cloud and the client with relative ease, then Silverlight is an excellent choice. For web-only applications Flash is so much supported that it would be crazy not to go with it, unless the computational weight of Flash becomes a problem: then the often ligter Silverlight might be a better choice.
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Use standard HTML for as much as possible. Complement the rest with flash.
If you choose Silverlight you'll exclude automatically all platforms which are not Windows mainstream (Vista and 7). Flash is well supported about everywhere.
I'm typing this on a Ubuntu workstation with Chrome. No Silverlight available here.
that in the post about Microsoft rebooting their old series, the link takes you to the Microsoft Flight website which is all done in flash. Why wouldn't they use Sliverlight for their own purposes?
It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.
JavaFX
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
There sure are a bunch of asstard HTML5 fanboys out there. These things serve different purposes, and your zealotry won't change that.
Neither.......HTML5......no plugins to crash or cause instability.
Google Chrome Frame, the HTML5 viewer for Internet Explorer, is just as much a plugin as Flash Player or Silverlight.
Been wanting to see flash go away for years and then Microsoft came out with Silverlight and its just another plugin you have to worry about and keep updated.
In that case, the answer is not eliminating Flash Player or Silverlight but instead automatic updates. Flash Player for Windows appears to have it covered; if an update is available, it grabs the update automatically the next time you log in to your user account.
HTML5 for everyone!! All flash is good for is advertisements and youporn sites.
How do you recommend making a vector animated series like Homestar Runner without Flash? Making it in Flash and then rendering the SWF to WebM for public distribution just bloats the file size by a factor of ten.
microsoft will drop silverlight like everything else they make when it fails to take over the world.
flash is barely tolerated since its (sort of) needed for video currently, noone will use when html5 is up.
there will be a short soft retreat of both, flash/silver to html5 converters will be used for awhile, and then theyll be forgotten, leaving only the tears of developers who got sucked in.
II've in my experience learned that sometimes standards and compatibility aren't as important considering the audience. My clients are the ones paying for their RIA and the ones using it. If I had a choice, it's between HTML supported by AJAX or Flash. It's been around longer and has a huge community. If my client requires something that must be done in Silverlight (whatever that may be) I just don't work for them.
It's time for html5. flash and silverlight need to assimilate each other and take their closed-source security nightmares with them.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
- on your target audience (think accessibility, think plugin penetration, etc)
- on your processes
- project budget
- features you want to implement
we (big London digital agency) would try to use html / javascript first, then Flash. Rarely rearely Silverlight. The latter is still clunkier to user for implementation, it is harder to find people who know how to use it and plugin penetration is much lower.
Having said all this, we are doing less and less Flash, and hopefully also less and less Silverlight, not needing any plugins in the future. then again one of my clients runs Lotus Nots and IE6 internally - that's HTML 5 out of the window. That's actually everything out of the window...
CmdrTaco, I am stunned to see such a biased and ridiculously slanted summary coming from your desk. Come on... “both combine...strong client support”? Are you kidding? Silverlight only runs fully featured enabled on Windows. Mac users suffer sub-par SilverLight performance due to issues with hardware acceleration, Linux users are left in the cold, and even the Windows technology has an awful track record. Let's take two large rollouts of SilverLight for example: Major League Baseball and Netflix Instant Play.
/., I would think the fact that SilverLight does not play on any open players or Linux distributions would be enough to reject this summary's premise alone. Flash, in spite of all the horrendous attributes inherent in that technology, at least actually plays on most platforms and mobile devices. Thus, I respectfully disagree with your primary assertion that these two technologies are even on the same playing field.
MLB: It does not take long to see that MLB had such an uproar of customer complaints about SilverLight that the MS player was quickly “benched”: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10212843-93.html
Netflix: The Netflix subsidized SilverLight player has resulted in an absolute flood of complains and a continual stream of glitches: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10199350-56.html http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/03/netflix-updates/
Of course, being that this is
If it only costs you $300 every three years then you are infringing on copyright.
Windows Vista Business costs $300. Windows 7 Professional costs $300. You use development tools distributed as free software, and you either run the free development tools on Windows or you run them on Linux and then test on a Windows machine on the same network. Whose copyright does this scenario infringe?
MS clearly stated that Silverlight is not going to compete with Flash, so why even make this comparison?
Did anyone else notice the topless chick on the right side of the page. Kinda masked by clowds. Very creepy Microsoft. Topless chick that kinda looks like a dude wearing a hat, sunglasses and a radio headset around her neck in a mini skirt. Not sure what you were going for here.
Wow... are those the only choices? No!
Javascript and HTML do well in a modern browser. That is the first choice.
Flash would be the second choice, that at least has multiple platforms it can run on. You only exclude the iCrap...
Silverlight? NOT the 3rd choice. The third choice is Java (and I hate Java). It is multiplatform but developing for it requires you to be a Java Developer and that is a bridge too far.
Silverlight would be behind Hypercard, RealPlayer, Quicktime and other things that could in no way make a RIA.. because guess what? Silverlight might be able to make a RIA but only on 2 platforms and one of them is worthless...
No, Steve is a conniving little bastard that's why they're excluding.. oh wai.. it's not an iPhone post?
Flash is shit, I wonder why anyone even bother with it.
I choose neither. I did not buy a 3+ ghz quad core processor to run a crippled web application.
I do not need a RIA environment to run rudimentary word processors or spreadsheets, plain old HTML form controls would get the job done if I was desperate.
Google mail is doing just fine as is and is about the only Web application I run.
But just like the last 20 years, the mass public will run around with its head cut off about how the web will take over everything, which it hasn't and never will. Jeesh, remember when we were all going to be running Java desktops with web browsers? Like that happened.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
HTML 5
Well this is the obviously (on slashdot) the unpopular choice, but I would say Silverlight. Maybe I say this because I work on a SL product. The fact is, HTML5 would be preferred (for cross platform), but it's hardly fully supported, and more importantly the project I work on is an enterprise application that has over 20 developers. Good luck co-ordinating an HTML5 effort like that. And Flash? Ya right. And while we could have done ASP.NET/ajax, it didn't have the kind of interactivity and "nice-looking" we wanted.
As it is, C# is extremely powerful, and to be fair, so is XAML. If you havn't played with WPF at all, then you don't really know what you're missing. Silverlight is unfortunately missing some of what WPF has to offer, and it is definitely buggier, but I love working with C# and .NET, and of course Visual Studio is an amazing development environment IMO.
Anyways, just my opinion. I only did a little Flash programming, and like most developers I've tinkered with almost every language and IDE out there a bit, but the bulk of my experience definitely falls to .NET, so I'm not denying I'm probably bias.
When did Silverlight get broad platform support? Last time i checked it worked on Windows and Mac. Mono is not an option as it is not really compatible. Its like saying IIS has broad platform support because firefox exists.
HTTP/1.1 400
Firefox 4 isn't due out until November
Firefox 4 beta 3 supports WebGL
I am aware of that. But what is the installed base of Firefox 4 beta 3 among one's web site's audience, especially given that Firefox 4 is reported to break extensions designed for Firefox 3.6.x? Until the Flash whitelist plug-in, which states that it works with "Firefox 1.5 - 3.7a5pre", is updated for Firefox 4, I do not feel ready to give it up just to try WebGL, and I'd bet that a lot of other Firefox users agree with me.
Flash of course. Freddie Mercury never wrote a song called Silverlight.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
A number of years ago the question was whether or not to use Flash. Flash may have become more ubiquitous since then but those arguments are still relevant. Do you favor pop/sizzle over accessibility/compatibility. Should you have valid reasons to go with pop/sizzle, then the question becomes one of Flash or Silverlight.
My hope is that HTML5 will render the pop/sizzle question meaningless as you could have sufficient pop/sizzle with something that is both accessible and compatible.
As it stands, if you need something richer than HTML/JavaScript, then you would want to go with the toolset that you know or that is easiest for you to learn with your current skillset. Microsoft developers would likely be better off with Silverlight. Everyone else...?
Going through, I'm shocked at how many blind idealists who's answers are basically one of two things:
Neither, because they don't do X the way I like.
Neither, because they aren't free.
Neither, because HTML 5 will be mo' better.
As George Thorogood said "Get a haircut and get a real job"
If you work for a BUSINESS and that business is interested in making MONEY you are going to pick a platform and get to work. No business worth it's EIN is going to say, oh, lets just wait until this other product is finalized and ubiquitous before we develop and roll out.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in
The page you linked admits that "there is currently no Linux support". Moonlight, a Free clone of Silverlight, is good for displaying "This page requires a newer version of Silverlight" notices.
I've read the comments and nobody has mentioned JavaFX. Then again, no one wants to get sued by Oracle for using it.
JavaFX is like Flash and Silverlight, but it runs on top of a JVM.
And let's not forget HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS.
I would go with GWT because..
1. No plugins, but still gives RIA experience.
2. 100% development in java.
3. Can be deployed on any java webserver running on any platform having a JRE.
I want people to be able to play the games I make, without technical issues. As limiting and slow as it is, Flash is currently the clear delivery platform for web based games.
The availability is 98% Flash, 5-10% Silverlight.
Where are you getting your numbers for Silverlight?
Rich Internet Application Statistics To my eyes, this looks more like 60% than 5%
I'm not sure if Adobe has followed suit, but Microsoft has released "Express" versions of the VS 2008 and 2010 IDEs. You can go to the MSDN right now and download a VB.Net or C# tooled version of Visual Studio 2010. No expiration, no credit cards, and you might not even need to register (can't remember on that one). Sure, you lose out on a bunch of the advanced functionality of the IDE, but you get all of the basics you need for doing SL development for FREE.
Now, if you want to have integrated unit tests, source control integration, automated web publishing and tons of other tools, then yeah, pony up the cash to get a retail copy.
Heck, even if you don't want to go that far, you can download the SL Dev tools and the .Net Framework from MS, write all your code in note pad, and just do compiles from the command line.
I haven't followed SharpDev for a while, so I'm not sure if they are supporting XAML yet, but their VB and C# IDE was pretty good a few years back if you wanted more features with out paying for it.
If you are curious about developing in Silverlight, you don't have to pay a dime to start. Just go get the free tools and play with it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Silverlight doesn't work on Linux. Flash does. Flash owns. Newgrounds is based on Flash, and owns. So Flash owns. All this decision about movies in Flash vs HTML5 doesn't affect me, what I care about is the Flash games and the Flash cartoons. Fortunately people are still so good to make them in Flash so that I can enjoy them on my Linux machine. If Silverlight would really start to get used, it'd be a real problem for me for that reason, because there are then so many little internet games I can't play anymore. The day Newgrounds would start accepting Silverlight content is the day it would die a little to me.
Oh and Moonlight? Even if it'd support 99.9% of the latest Silverlight version, it'd still not be enough, because that 0.1% is probably exactly going to be the functionality required for just that little game or cartoon you wanted to play/watch. No, choose Flash please!
Writing from the standpoint of an intranet developer, I have control of most of the end user's environment... and those things I can't control, I'm aware of. Daily, I am tasked with bringing data from numerous systems that have a variety of data stores, most of them in MySQL, XML, or available as web services. Looking at both Flash and Silverlight, we went with Flash (via FLEX) to control the appearance across a variety of browsers and ease of integration with existing data stores. FLEX also handles authentication against our AD server and integrates well with WordPress to deliver the same applications directly from the web or desktop with the same code for both our OS X and Vista users via Adobe Air. Silverlight, though to be fair I haven't given the latest release an adequate evaluation, provided to be troublesome for the OS X folks where our Flash applications generate no trouble tickets with the held desk. Just my anecdotal two cents, but Flash FTW when it comes to the current RIA offerings.
(name withheld by request)
JavaFX is better than either of these technologies. Really. No, I don't work for Oracle/Sun.
For major LOB apps, the kind that needs to keep state on the client to a degree, the kind that deals with data from a large number of data sources, say Oracle plus a couple of WebService servers integrating some financial data from a IBM system-i solution etc, the choice is IMNSHO rather easy. You go with Silverlight. If it is internal.
Typically such apps are developed by moderate sized, or even small-ish development teams who have no need to deploy outside of the corporate network. Silverlight has, by a decent margin at 4.0, the upper hand on Flash. The tools and the programming language are simply better - maintaining C# code is far easier than maintaining Actionscript code. C# is basically just Java, to the degree that you can almost copy and paste Java and compile it with a C# compiler (not that I recommend that, there are things you'd miss that you should make use of in C#).
Some people would recommend you do this in Javascript/AJAX etc, they are insane or have never developed a serious LOB app. You really, really should not even try. GWT makes it a little less painful, but only a little so. There are still a significant amount of differences between browsers, even when compiled by GWT to browser-specific Javascript, to make GWT a maintenance nightmare.
Flash/Flex (haven't moved on to the latest one) is good if you need to integrate with the external world. For suppliers and partners you can just mandate Silverlight, but for the general public you should go with Flash. On the other hand, if your app exposed to the general world is of a high complexity with client state management etc, you might want to re-think the approach in general.
IE 9 is supposed to support HTML5 I thought so no need for Chrome Frame.
Simple, I'll pick the one that supports x64 Linux! If both do, then I'll pick the FLOSS version.
Different tools for different jobs. This is the first post that isn't some rant about [Evil Empire | Flash Vulnerability | Linux Support]. The truth is never as polarized as people want it to be.
Mod the parent up, please.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Flash is alive not because of a World Wide conspiracy against HTML5, it is alive because it is backed by Adobe Design tools which are used by designers in a complete workflow.
When HTML5 really finalizes to usable stage, they won't use emacs or vi, they will still use Adobe tools supporting HTML5 output. If you haven't been to a professional design house, visit one of them soon and see the scene.
MS still dreams that these people will install Visual something "nerd" thing to Windows (right, Windows not OS X) and use them while these guys barely uses mouse anymore because they memorized all keyboard shortcuts.
Where are the design tools for OS X? Or are we still playing "if you don't use my OS, fsck you" kind of passive aggressive games MS? I stopped following after they talked about Eclipse IDE on OS X.
You better tell the "video" you talk about is not some TV rip, badly transcoded "monkey dancing" video, it is $1M+ production backed by $10B companies and their lawyers/producers.
Once the movie/video enters final phase, it is the producer and his backers who decides what to do with it. They have no problems with "patents" or "non standard", clever ones just care about MPEG standards (after learning it hard way) and documented workflows backed by big companies who actually has support staff which can make to studio in 1 hour in case something goes wrong.
For example, there is no "politically correct" way of enabling anti-rip (in fact,making it harder) technology in HTML5. Imagine the slashdot if Apple/Mozilla/Google/MS implemented it.
"Plugin" is just a word.
Other than the fact that the Chrome Frame installer, the Flash Player installer, and the Silverlight installer are all executable programs that the end user needs to download and then have an administrator run?
If there is one thing that annoys me about it the most, it's the onslaught of Adobe Updater, iTunes Updater, Java Updater pop-ups that I have to endure upon logging into the user account.
Do you also get annoyed when Ubuntu pops up its Update Manager?
How do you recommend making a vector animated series like Homestar Runner without Flash? Making it in Flash and then rendering the SWF to WebM for public distribution just bloats the file size by a factor of ten.
This.
Would you still be in favor of rendering SWF to WebM if someone were to increase the file size of everything you upload or download by a factor of ten and then bill you for overages? Satellite Internet access in the United States still has a monthly cap of 5 to 10 GB.
FYI that this is not the original story. The original is at http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/infoworld-review-microsoft-silverlight-4-vs-adobe-flash-101-260
Ok, so "low tech" maybe isn't quite the most accurate way to look at these two atrocities, but let me give you a fucked up example, where even a "champion" for one of these, shows how stupidly it can and will be abused, to the frustration and disappointment of the public, in a way that negates all the technological advances they have come to accept as daily reality.
Yesterday. That was the day I finally installed Silverlight on my work computer. Why did I do that? Because I wanted to make sure Bing wasn't having any problems crawling a website that I handle, so I headed over to Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster Tools used to be a website and it worked ok, but now they only have a page that sends you this Silverlight application for you to download and run. Ew. But I have a job to do so I went ahead.
The new Bing Webmaster Tools offers nothing, no really new capabilities that a web app wouldn't also be able to do. (Well, no advantages except that now I'm running some Microsoft code (!) on my machine with all my privileges, instead of on their server. I can see how that might be an advantage for somebody but surely not for me.)
But balancing this nothingness, let's look at the technological disaster of this new crippled UI. At first, it looks like a web page, maybe because you see it in your browser. But if you treat it like a web page, you'll find that you can't do the things that you've taken for granted the last decade or so. Try to open a "link" in another tab or window -- oops, all I have is a "Silverlight preferences" menu option, not the usual stuff. Wanna open a link other than having it open in your current window? Sorry. Wanna inspect element? Wanna override some styling? Wanna save an image (other than using our OS' screen grabber)? Bzzt. Wanna have any of your unenumerable browser plugins do .. whatever.. with the data on the page? Sorry, the data you're looking at isn't really in the DOM, except as an inpenetrable >object< chunk. Want to clip an error message and paste it into a search blank to find out how other people are interpreting it and dealing with it? Yeah, right. Wanna have the computer speak some highlighted text? Sorry, even if you could highlight text, this wouldn't work. It's not that I need the computer to speak (my problem is the opposite; my hearing is trashed), the point is that if Microsoft didn't think of a feature, then you don't have it.
You just went back in time over 15 years. All the improvements to browsers, all that progress, suddenly doesn't exist anymore. All that incremental building-up and stacking power upon power, is gone.
It's jarring. It's shocking and immediately in your face as soon as you try to use it. That first-image impression of being a web page, shatters and is replaced with disappointment, the instant you try to do anything.
Of course, Flash is just as bad, for some of the same reasons. If you're asking me which pre-web tech (holy crap, I know people who can walk and speak, who are younger than the web now!) that I'm rooting for, I say fuck you both.
Hail to the web, baby. For all of HTML5's problems with getting adopted, the codec standardization problem, etc, its present-day reality is still so many years beyond the alternatives, that it's not even funny.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
After silveright 3, it's been great to work with Silverlight as a developer. It's great for business applications and the best thing is you can download it and run it out of browser like a regular desktop application. HTML 5 might be fine for video, but there are many other uses for Silverlight or Flash. I love all the Microsoft hating posts. Everything an article has the word Microsoft in it, people just pile on saying how much Apple is better. I've heard that over 50% of computers have silverlight, and many broadcasts include the olympics require it. Silverlight is also the programming language for Windows 7 phone, and almost identical to the desktop language WPF. Silverlight isn't going anywhere.
I have about 15 virtual systems running on 5 physical systems today. The current Flash will only run on 2 of those machines since it is Windows x32. 1 is a physical Win7 Ultimate x32 and the other is a WinXP Pro x32 running in a VM. All the other machines/VMs are x64 running Linux x64 or x64 Win7.
x64 Windows **is** mainstream these days. Heck, VMware Vsphere client won't run on x32 Windows soon.
We are about to release a new type of Internet Platform that, in my humble opinion, will revolutionize how web software is created and shared. While Microsoft and Adobe are modifying their monolithic software to adapt to the web, our software was created from the get-go to be part of the web. More information can be found here: http://www.otakhi.com/ Here are a few selected videos showing its versatility: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S--kaOg6a4E (2D) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iifby9CGgVM (3D) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-arW7O9HJM (Interactivity and Networking) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XRhKvysZUA (Drag & Drop in 15 lines of Javascript) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGZJkX91XL8 (Real-Time Collaboration) Best Regards
Java Applets or WebStart. Why not?
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
develop for IE and Firefox on Windows, and for every other version, we redirect to www.microsoft.com.
If you really hate both, support Silverlight, if you suspect the loser will disappear. Whatever one wins will require cross platform support, and I just don't think MS will provide that. Once they gain superiority, it will probably be like it was with IE, they'll sit on it, not make any real improvements, stop all Mac development and never even address Linux. By that time, HTML 5 will be finished and ready and since it's the only cross browser and platform choice, it will win.
For those who don't read subject line:
Silverlight 4 only 'runs' on Microsoft Windows. Moonlight goes as far as supporting Silverlight 2.0 specs, and even that is flaky - no DRM support (don't bitch about it to me, bitch about it to content developers deploying it), some parts of API is missing, codecs have to be downloaded manually and more funk. Compare that to Flash Player, a similar and similarly abused technology, but one which works on most platforms today without a lot of funky quirks. I would know, I write Flash Player applications on Ubuntu.
In a nutshell: Silverlight is not even in the same league as Flash, as far as adoptance and platform support is concerned. Microsoft is also out of touch with reality and it is my opinion that they should not be depended upon when it comes to "enriching" the Web, but I have elaborated on this before, so I am not going to repeat myself.
In fact the whole article sounds (didn't say it in fact is) like someones desperate pitch to bring peoples attention back to Silverlight, as if it is already forgotten. Which it should be, because there is at least one wrong thing with it - the abovementioned platform support, which I believe will not catch up anyway. Things just go too fast these days, if you are not on top after a year, scrap it and redirect dire resources elsewhere.
Can please anyone explain to me why there are no more alternatives to Flash? The market for this technology is huge, like all PCs, all Laptops, all Smartphones combined. That should be at least 90% of all devices connected to the internet. It's like everybody thinking, hm Flash have 99% no we leave this market to Adobe let them sell their Adobe Flash Professional CS5 for US$699 to every web developer on the planet. Sun had already the Java technology and they manage it to make it available to at least 50% of the computers in the first 5 years. MS had of course the big advantage because they own 90% of all computers.
My question is simple: Why really nobody get to this big market and left everything to Adobe?
If the alternative would have at least 5% or something, it would be still a big market share to sell tools and services. How can the biggest technology companies, like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, etc. left this huge profit margin all to Adobe?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I went into the butchers the other day & bet the man behind the counter 50 quid he couldn't reach the meat on the top shelf.
He said I dunno about that, the steaks are fairly high.
http://madbean.com/anim/totallygridbag/
I'd choose Flash 10.1 over Silverlight 4.0 Clearly a version 10 is better than a version 4. (kidding, com'on now)
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
Good luck trying to do everything Flex 4/AIR 2 does with HTML5.
I develop RIAs for a living, and I'll use whatever technology the customer wants. Once in a while somebody mentions Silverlight or HTML5, but 99% of the time they want Flash. Independently of any technical merits, Flash is all that they have heard of usually.
What I want to know is not which of two competing lock-in traps is nicer to work with or delivers more impressive results. What I want to know is: where is the open-standards based answer? We've had Flash for about 14 years now. Java applets have come and gone. Microsoft is trying to take Adobe's cake with Silverlight, but isn't meeting with a lot of success. Meanwhile, Flash continues to be widely used, while others are hard at work trying to make interactive applacations using HTML and JavaScript. Technologically, this is a disaster. How come there isn't an open, open-standards and open-source technology that does vector graphics and animation and scripting and user interaction? There's obviously demand for it. It's also not that hard to create. Where is it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
A few things you might want to know about Silverlight 4 before assuming the new shiney toy is the better one:
- Drop down boxes have no keyboard support (press U in a country list does nothing, you have to do it manually)
- Right click menus don't exist unless you make the control windowless
- You get fewer shortcut keys than Javascript
- You won't have Silverlight 4 installed on a fresh Windows 7 machine
- The scroll container control (ScrollViewer) has no inbuilt support for tabbing between controls or mousewheel support
- Unlike CSS there is no styling inheritence besides per-control styling, it's equivalent of having #ids for everything
- Visual Studio 2010 support is extremely crash-prone
- The MSDN documentation is poor to say the least
- It only works on one browser on the Mac
On the plus side
- It doesn't crash your Mac
- The parts they haven't butchered from WPF give you some very nice layout and animation features
- You get a strongly typed language
- You get a mostly awesome IDE to use it. And also Blend.
- It's not Adobe
...you can start using it today! It's a very exciting time.
Until the browser people agree on the specs the content won't work the same or render identically on most browsers, and that does seem to be a problem for a lot of people.
But to be honest I rather like the idea of "this website is best viewed with [insert xxxx browser.]" In a sense it made people think about the designs they were making and the code they were writing - not a bad thing at all.
The MLB jump was totally expected. At that point they were using SL2, which was really SL1.1 with a name change so people wouldn't associate it with SL1, that used an entirely different system (SL1 was basically a XAML rendering plug in that depended on JS for everything). SL2 was the first iteration of SL to use the Silverlight Framework (a trimmed down version of the .Net framework).
Is that supposed to make me feel better about Silverlight?
Before I just didn't know anything about Silverlight. Now I know that SL2 and SL1.1 were the same thing, but totally different, with a different name, but the first release was totally something else from later releases, because the first version of Silerlight didn't even use Silverlight, but now Silverlight uses Silverlight, which is like .NET except not like .NET.
*/me runs away screaming*
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Running something other than HTML5 in the browser is over. If you're investing in something other than HTML5, make it iOS because it has a large installed base, extremely high quality, easy monetization, and a long future.
HTML5 is impressive... but has anyone actually tried to access an object that they create inside the canvas after you create it? You can't put objects in the canvas unless you write them in javascript, and even then... I've found no real good way to make them persist and have a reference to build controls within them (ie... make a re-usable panel that animates...and can contain buttons and form fields).
Sure... it animates things... but can anyone find more than 2 real world samples of someone showing off what they're doing with the canvas and form controls? It's like they built the house... and then forgot to put in doors and windows.
I totally agree. Silverlight has amazing development tools and a real langauge (or two or three) backing it up. It's just a lot harder (sometimes impossible) to develop a complex LOB application in anything else. With the new dynamic language (DLR) featues of c#, LINQ, the Entity Framework rich REST and web service support, it's hard to beat (not to meantion the ability to have your core business logic code running on the server, the desktop the browser and a Windows Phone 7 device without any changes) for LOB development.
However, if you need to reach 100% of the public right now then Flash just has better penetration. This is slowly changing, of course.
Would be nice if Silverlight didn't break Hotmail's attachment handling on my wife's Mac Firefox.
That'd be awesome. We could put it next to our food replicators.
I don't really take issue with the scores they gave, per se.
They weight importance of "Developer Tools" w/ 30% and "Client Support" w/ 20%, an interesting editorial choice because nobody chooses to create flash content flash because of how easy it is; peoile choose the format based on market penetration. Adobe could mandate punch cards for the development environment and people would *still* choose it over Silverlight because thats where the audience is. A more accurate weight for client support would be like 95% at least.
Of course I'm a curmudgeon, and the choice of "flash" vs. "silverlight" is right up there with asking me which finger would I like to chop off.
Typically such apps are developed by moderate sized, or even small-ish development teams who have no need to deploy outside of the corporate network. Silverlight has, by a decent margin at 4.0, the upper hand on Flash. The tools and the programming language are simply better - maintaining C# code is far easier than maintaining Actionscript code. C# is basically just Java, to the degree that you can almost copy and paste Java and compile it with a C# compiler (not that I recommend that, there are things you'd miss that you should make use of in C#).
Just as a side note - you're not locked into C#, either. Aside from the usual duo of it and VB, one can also use (Iron)Python and (Iron)Ruby for development, which seems to be a growing trend.
They weight importance of "Developer Tools" w/ 30% and "Client Support" w/ 20%, an interesting editorial choice because nobody chooses to create flash content flash because of how easy it is; peoile choose the format based on market penetration. Adobe could mandate punch cards for the development environment and people would *still* choose it over Silverlight because thats where the audience is. A more accurate weight for client support would be like 95% at least.
This depends on the specific task. For most Internet sites, your adjustments would be correct. For intranet apps, though, ease of development is a very significant factor, so much so, in fact, that adjustment would probably have to be made the other way.
Reminds me of the Monty Python contest where the winner's choices of prize include A Poke in the Eye and A Boot in the Teeth.
I think the fact that Silverlight is mentioned as a serious competitor to Flash means that Microsoft has done something right. I've worked as a dev manager on enterprise systems using both Flex and Silverlight, and my take on it is that it really doesn't matter what you choose - as long as all devs in the team are productive. So if you're working in a Microsoft shop - Visual Studio 2010 makes the whole DB/middleware/client stack really simple to work with. If you're working in a Java shop - Flexbuilder, BlazeDS and Eclipse J2EE makes the whole DB/middleware/client stack simple to work with.
I know I'll be hated on by the dogmatics, but end users really don't care. (Yeah, I know that Silverlight doesn't work on linux - but the amount of page hits by linux desktops are statistically insignificant.)
It is obvious. I use linux, I use Flash, I like Adobe who, unlike MS, is trying to keep its application clean and functional. Microsoft is predatory, and if they succeed in displacing Adobe, say goodbye to royalty low costs for flash and say hello to high charges fro Silverlight
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Hmmm... that's a good point that I hadn't considered. I haven't seen too many flash intranet apps but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a growing market for silverlight in that arena.
Silverlight is at version 4. Flash is at version 10.
That's the most obvious choice I've seen in a long time.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
What a shocker....