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Silverlight 5 Released
New submitter CaptSlaq sends word that Silverlight 5 has been released. Microsoft has not revealed whether it will be the last version.
"New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives. In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight."
The multi-ton elephant in the room is Netflix.
As of about 2 years ago Flash was our main development platform for web applications. We still have clients that demand IE 6 support so in those cases Flash was always the better option to ensure a fast development cycle that works on 90%+ of browsers. Especially since each version of IE counts as a separate testing platform.
Now, however, we're moving away from flash at a *rapid* pace. Why? Mostly Mobile. Flash is *terrible* on mobile, where it's supported. My opinion is that Flash is only on mobile to allow adverts.
Our Clients are a demanding lot, and they demand Mobile support for their applications now. They also still ask for IE 6 support. Now we say to them: You can have Mobile, or IE 6, not both. We develop websites for mobile, we develop using Javascript only, no more flash. It carries over well to the full site too (really, the only differences between mobile and desktop is the layout and the CSS), and while it'll technically work fine on IE6, it will be slow as molasses and look terrible. Our clients love the shiny, and when they see IE 6 doesn't do the shiny, they're actually more inclined to just say 'screw it, so long as it runs, it can run as slow as it wants, it's the users fault'
We're up to our eyeballs in Microsoft tech here too. IIS, ASP.net, Visual Studio, Azure Cloud. But we've only used silverlight for 2 applications, and that was just to try it out. It does video better than flash, but it's low penetration really rules it out of larger projects. With our move away from flash we won't be ramping up silverlight.
Certainly, the main reason we stay with flash is for Video playback. We've got one client with a video library site that requires an encrypted streaming server. So far we've not found a way to make that work in Javascript alone.