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Microsoft Killing Silverlight?
SharkLaser writes "Silverlight 5 might be last version released by Microsoft. Several industry insiders and partners for the last few weeks have heard from their own Microsoft sources that there won't be new versions released after Silverlight 5. Status on service packs and support for Silverlight is unclear, as Microsoft haven't yet released lifecycle support end date even for the previous Silverlight 4. By their support page they will give full year head-up before ending support. With Adobe ending development of Flash for mobile browsers and Microsoft ending development of Silverlight, HTML5 video looks a lot more promising. But will content providers be able to give out their material without DRM and how does HTML5 perform with non-video side of Flash and Silverlight?"
...nothing of value were lost.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Yup. Would anyone have installed Silverlight if it hadn't been for Netflix?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Except Adobe is clearly moving towards killing off flash. They've announced the death of mobile flash in favour of HTML5, and it seems likely that desktop flash will eventually follow.
After all, it doesn't really matter to Adobe what runtime is used. They don't make money off people downloading the Flash runtime. They do make money off selling the flash designer software, which costs hundreds of dollars, and the streaming server solutions. What difference does it make if Adobe's software is spitting out stuff that runs in the flash runtime or HTML5?
My concern is that HTML5 is clearly not up to the level where it has feature parity (or stability/consistency) with Flash or Silverlight. For example, HTML5 currently has no agreed upon standard for dynamic audio. Sure, it can play a sound or music file, but if you want to actually generate or process audio, that's impossible. Mozilla and WebKit both have their own proprietary competing APIs to do this, but neither is final yet, and certainly not a standard.
Given a few years, HTML5 will probably be able to replace Flash/Silverlight, but clearly not yet!