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?"

Comments

Which one should you choose?

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:Which one should you choose?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Neither is the correct answer. Or more specifically, HTML5.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Or that would be the analogy, if HTML5 adoption wasn't in its infancy and inconsistently implemented where it is supported.

Re:Which one should you choose?

[49152]

In the long run, maybe.

It will all depend on whether Microsoft will support it properly in their future web browsers, they might say their committed to supporting all kinds of standards right now, but I have heard that from them before, so I want hold my breath.

If you actually need to make something for a paying customer right now then unfortunately Flash is very often the correct (or even the only) choice right now. Silverlight may be good enough or even better in many respects but does not come anywhere near the reach of Flash. Flash is basically everywhere. The only exception is hand-held devices but on those I would in fact agree with Steve Jobs, it is usually better to make the effort to create a native version.

Really! I do wish html5 was ready and available everywhere, but it is not. Maybe in 3 to 5 years when it has reached something like 50% of the browsers 'out there'. Right now it is just a toy to play with to get a glimpse of what the future may behold.

This does not mean I disagree with the ideas behind HTML5 or open standards, by all means it would be perfect if I could use it in my projects right now. But my customers actually require something that would run on (at least) 95% of all Internet connected computers without the user installing anything Flash meats that criteria, Silverlight does not and HTML5 does not even show up on the radar yet.

At least there is some hope that the future will be brighter. :-)

Re:Which one should you choose?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Flash is for Flash Video - Will soon (Hopefully) be redundant

Silverlight is for .....we nothing really

Both are blocked on all my browsers, Flash with Flashblock so I can play video when I want, Silverlight by not installing it ...

Games are better played on the PC not in a browser, and I would not trust Silverlight with a Windows Machine, and it does not work properly on any other

Re:Which one should you choose?

[JasterBobaMereel]

For DRM'd video content nothing works properly, it's broken as designed

If your TV company does not have it's own player, give up it won't work reliably and on all machines ...

Which one should you choose?

[EddydaSquige]

Neither.

To appease the most visitors with ease

[bemenaker]

I would go with Flash just because most people have it. The install base is substantially higher than silverlight.

Re:To appease the most visitors with ease

[DrXym]

Silverlight has absolutely abysmal support on Linux. Seems like the only Silverlight applications that are actually publicly use stuff not included in Moonlight.

Which is why Moonlight was doomed to fail from the get go. The devs could implement the thing perfectly and it still wouldn't play the DRM'd content that most Silverlight sites actually use it for. So that is more or less that.

Silverlight as a concept is sound and in many ways more desirable than Flash. e.g. you can write proper multithreaded apps in Silverlight. It's too bad it's firmly stuck to one platform and any claims it works on others are just a bad joke.

Both feed on developers

[turkeyfish]

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.

Neither

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Neither

[ProppaT]

Fine, HTML 5. HTML 5 is great, we can all agree on that. Now which video codec? The one nice thing about Silverlight and Flash is that they're, more or less, all inclusive packages. HTML 5 relies on too many outside variables ATM to make it viable. The openness of HTML 5 is a blessing and a curse. We still need Silverlight and Flash for the time being for the 75% of the market who's never heard of a codec. The road to HTML 5 is going to be an ugly and bloody one...

Re:Neither

[naz404]

Big networks and hollywood studios will not release a lot of their content for streaming on the web without DRM protection. As much as we hate DRM, content producers & clients demand it.

Sorry, gotta pay the bills. In its current form, native HTML5 browser media players are no solution.

Re:Neither

[Anonymous Coward]

Well-deployed sure, but certainly not efficient. There's a valid and important reason Netflix chose Silverlight for its movie support, and that was because Flash performs abysmally for larger video (before 10.1 it was a horror). For instance, take Hulu, which uses Flash for its deployment. Hulu works well on semi-modern machines that can handle it, but it sucks on the cheap and old PCs/laptops most viewers have; when scaled to fullscreen their systems just can't handle the playback. But Netflix is much better at SD and HD video, even when those same viewers are on 10 y/o systems. Silverlight always decodes/renders with performance measurable to that of the system's native media player, while Flash adds a consistent and often immense overhead.

Re:WebGL

[Thanshin]

how are either of the above better than WebGL + natively JIT compiled Javascript ?

A catchier name.

WebGL is the future, though not the present

[tepples]

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.

WTF

[inode_buddha]

This is like comparing shit with corn in it, vs. shit with peanuts in it. Which one would *you* rather eat?

magazine excerpt?

[DriveDog]

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.

AJAX

[Peeteriz]

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.

Re:AJAX

[terjeber]

For simplistic websites, sure. Works like a charm. Developing a major LOB app that has to deal with entity state, client state etc, doing it in JavaScript/AJAX and HTML would be suicidal at best. The functionality simply isn't there, and you'd be insane to try it.

The vast majority of SW development is in-house apps that cater to very specific LOB needs. For those apps, Silverlight is the optimal choice if you have control of the environment, and Flash/Flex if you need to share with the general world outside.

Absolutely

[Casandro]

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.

Re:Absolutely

[gaspyy]

"Somewhat" is an understatement.
Flash is ubiquitous. You'd be hard-pressed to find a computer without it. With Silverlight, MS had to pay developers to build something with it and in many cases (NYTimes) thy still abandoned it. The availability is 98% Flash, 5-10% Silverlight.

As for waiting, HTML5 and strong support is years away. Don't be fooled by "Browser X scores 100/100 on Acid 3" -- I am working on a HTML5/CSS3 project right now and all browsers have major rendering bugs and omissions, most of them documented (aliasing for transformed objects, no clipping in some instances when border-radius is used and many more).

Even ignoring older versions of IE, developing any complex app for Firefox, Webkit and Opera is still a daunting task.

"HTML5" may be the newest buzzword, much like "ajax" and "web 2.0" but the reality is in many many cases Flash would give better results in less time and with broader reach.

Re:Absolutely

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason Silverlight has any install base at all is that Microsoft pushed it out through Windows Update.

Re:Absolutely

[psbrogna]

The reason why people downloaded Flash is not because it was the only game in town, it was because a large # of content producers chose to deliver content in Flash. The same can't be said of Silverlight.

Re:Absolutely

[gbjbaanb]

As long as you stay in the MS stack,

and there's the rub - no more 'best of breed' interoperability, its MS-only, all the way. Of course, that's hope MS likes it. I'm not sure its a winning strategy for a corporate to follow nowadays, what with iPhone, iPads, Android and Meego coming up. The future of computing is "convergent communication" devices, not desktop PCs, so anyone following a Ms-only strategy might get burned in the future.

This is probably the best reason to become familiar with Flex/Air/Flash instead of Silverlight, simply to de-risk your future development efforts.

Re:HTML5+SVG+CSS3

[6031769]

With version 9, IE will also support open standards nicely.

That's quite an assertion - unless by "nicely" you mean "barely", "feebly" or "tortuously". Given the fantastic history of standard compliance in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

None of them, complemented with Flash

[markus_baertschi]

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.

Wow

[wampus]

There sure are a bunch of asstard HTML5 fanboys out there. These things serve different purposes, and your zealotry won't change that.

Re:Wow

[stewbacca]

That's the problem with most criticisms of Adobe products. People who aren't designers don't use them they way they were intended to be used. It's like watching a novice carpenter complain that his saw is an awful hammer.

Comparing Apples to Rocks

[inshreds]

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.

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 /., 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.

Dukakis vs Bush...

[chrishillman]

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...

Re:Choices

[mdwh2]

I like how Iphone support is seen as important when it lacks this feature that many other phones have; yet companies (and even public funded organisations like the BBC and Government) are happy to write proprietary apps only for those with Iphones...

There's an uproar when the BBC or Government requires the use of things like Windows or Flash (and rightly so), even though 90%+ of the population can use them. But requiring the use of an Iphone, that only ~3% of the mobile phone population have? Oh, perfectly fine. The correct response is that we should always be supporting open cross-platform solutions, of course.

Re:Alien Versus Predator

[ByOhTek]

I don't think you grasped the theme here.

Re:Alien Versus Predator

[poetmatt]

Actually, it's more like the choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.

Moonlight is behind

[tepples]

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.

Re:Alien Versus Predator

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when Microsoft comes up with a tool that allows non-coder graphic designers or animators to create entire apps in Silverlight with the same ease that you can with Flash.
 

Wake me up when Adobe or Microsoft (or anyone, for that mater) comes up with a tool that allows non-coder graphic designers or animators to create entire apps that don't take up huge amounts of bandwidth, don't run like drunk turtles, and don't reinvent ever UI widget under the sun (including label text.)

Silverlight for in-house and Flash/Flex for other

[terjeber]

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.

Re:Alien Versus Predator

[Sockatume]

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Re:Alien Versus Predator

[machxor]

Wake me up when Microsoft comes up with a tool that allows non-coder graphic designers or animators to create entire apps in Silverlight with the same ease that you can with Flash.

The assumption that a non-coder can code an application (using any tool/language/whatever) is exactly why the web is littered with crappy web sites and applications that don't work like they should.

People have skills in particular areas and need to recognize that and know when to ask for help. For instance I have a knack for coding but not graphics/design. So when I'm coding up a new web application I go search for a template/designer/whatever I need to fill the gap in my skill set.