May 9, 2008

It would seem that Microsoft should be a primary eater of their own dogfood. How else will they convince us it's a worthy competitor to Flash?

A bit of a non post isn't it? Microsoft used Flash before Silverlight existed and it's going to take take time to roll it out everywhere?

Until version 2.0 is released, I doubt you will see MS promote Silverlight. I think developers are waiting to use the .NET Framework featured in the 2.0 version.

You can view the *nix version progress here...
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Maybe Microsoft's afraid of promoting or using their own product.

Or maybe the development and deployment cycles of their hundreds? thousands? of sites mean that it will take some time and that Silverlight will take some time to appear.

I guess it would have been sexy and remarkable if MS had managed to re-launch every one of their product pages and web properties in the past six months, but speaking as someone who's actually worked in the web industry, I can tell you that's wildly unrealistic.

Hi Eli,

Actually there are many Microsoft sites using Silverlight. Just a few examples to prove out my point:
http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/events/default.mspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/overviewdemo/
http://robochamps.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/business/success/
http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/
http://my.liveatedu.com/
https://partner.microsoft.com/us/40052889
http://www.microsoft.com/ces/

Most of the Flash-based content on the Microsoft site dates back prior to the launch of Silverlight.

Best wishes,

Tim Sneath | Group Manager, Microsoft.

SilverLight 2 is still in BETA stage. Nobody wants to use 1.0 version once tried 2.0.

If you had searched a little more, you would know that Silverlight isn't mature yet, and will probably be changed many times before Microsoft promotes its use on large scale.
Moreover, I advise you to document a little bit about http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight which makes it possible to use Silverlight on Linux.

It's an easy question to answer, and you answered it yourself; Silverlight has not been rolled out across all platforms, and people would cry foul if Microsoft restricted their website content to Windows only by using Silverlight.

You said:
"Silverlight isn't supported in Linux, but as an avid Ubuntu fan, I can tell you that Flash does not work well in Linux either."
I don't wish to sound rude, but downloading a tar.gz file of Adobe's site and extracting it in to ~/.mozilla/plugins isn't exactly difficult. Having done that, flash in most browsers works instantly, and in Konqueror you just have to click a button that says 'Look for new plugins'.

Flash doesn't work well under Linux? Adobe provides Flash for Linux, which works just fine, you don't have to use reimplementations like Gnash unless you want to.

You think maybe it's possible the MS websites that still use flash are limited by budget and time constraints just like everyone else and they just haven't had a chance to convert to Silverlight yet? MS is a corporate entity just like every other company and it's going to take quite a bit of time for this tech to filter down into every piece of it.

In response to the points that it will take time for MS to roll out, and that they are waiting for the beta: That would make more sense to me if they only rolled out Silverlight on MSDN, as it's reasonable to assume that MS developers would be OK with using a beta program. But why burden the incredible amount of people (Alexa #14 and Compete.com #9) that use the Microsoft Home Page with Silverlight? Look at the Slashdot comments; people hate the pop-up annoying them about Silverlight. Why not start on MS Research sites, where the crowd might be more welcoming?

Further, Microsoft has never really been known to wait until a product is perfect--witness Windows Vista--before releasing it and almost forcing it upon users. That behavior is what often gets Ballmer and gang in trouble. So the slow rollout may be a function of practical development cycles, but it nonetheless signals a change of course for Microsoft.

Adobe DOES provide a version of Flash for Linux--but it is far from "working well." I've never gotten Adobe Flash to work on even 50% of the Flash-based sites I visit daily in Hardy Heron. And I'm not alone. Look at the response on Adobe's own blog to their latest release of Flash for Linux. According to KDE Developer Richard Dale, who probably knows Linux fairly well, Adobe Flash for Linux is "crap." It certainly is not as easy as surfing over to YouTube and following the pop-up for installing the Flash plug-in--unless you go with an open-source version like Gnash.

The Moonlight project is actually an example of MS acting as expected. The true indication of a technology being cross-platform is the lack of need for specialized hacks of the software to work on one platform. When both Adobe and MS introduce perfectly working version of their technologies on Linux, the need for Gnash and Moonlight will disappear, and both companies will really have turned over a new leaf.

"I've never gotten Adobe Flash to work on even 50% of the Flash-based sites I visit daily in Hardy Heron."

Really? Can you provide a few URLs? I don't know of any sites which don't work with Flash from Linux. It's just as easy to install Flash on Hardy Heron (from which I'm posting right now), and it's even easier to keep updated as it is on Windows or OSX.

As a former Ubuntu user, I would also have told you that Flash doesn't work well under linux. And then I tried the Archlinux distribution and I can tell you now that flash works really well under linux. Ubuntu doesn't use/configure it properly.

Lamest. Post. Ever.

Come on really now? It prefers Flash over Silverlight? Perhaps it just takes time to convert the thousands of pages to SL?

MSDN and TechNet use Silverlight more and more as pages get converted. www.windowsmobile.ca was just re-done with SL and there are pages and pages lined up to be re-done in SL.

It takes time. It takes money. It takes developers like me to do the work.

Please, the only reason you wrote this post was to attract people with a ridiculous headline. Shame on you.

I worked with silverlight a little at work to see if it would work for our website better then flash. I used it for around 2 days and gave up on it. It was very frustrating and the developing program was not very user friendly. This is not unusual for Microsoft products to begin with so I was certainly not surprised here.

I do not think that Microsoft Silverlight can even compete for a couple of years at least. Users like myself have years with flash. We are comfortable with it. We've used it. It is a very dependable HTML alternative and looks good 90% of the time.

Silverlight has barely been out over a year. We've never used it. We've seen how Microsoft has released products before that needed to wait a couple of months/years. (IE7, Windows ME, Vista.) This type of rapsheet is not going to make users want to use silverlight.

You'll notice that Silverlight 2 BETA 1 has only been out for just a little while now. Adoption isn't instantaneous, but a gradual thing. To say they are afraid to use Silverlight is ridiculous. Also, the source you cited about Silverlight 2 not being supported in Opera was from 12/2007, approaching half a year ago.

Did it not occur to this guy that some of the 'flash' sites on Microsoft were around before Silverlight! - wouldn't make commercial sense to pay to have them all developed again... Non Story here..

I'm running Ubuntu; the flash plugin crashes my browser occasionally, but it has viewed every flash page I've ever gone to (with exception of one or two that are hardwired to "require" IE; I lied with UserAgentSwitcher and told the site I was running IE and *they* worked too.)

As for Silverlight for Linux; a version that supports part of 1.1, and no media playback, is essentially not a useful Silverlight implementation. Silverlight for Linux is vaporware until a usable version is released, and it's disingenuous for Microsoft to claim there's a Linux release until it's reasonably feature-complete.

Pretty sensationalist article! What would you have proposed MS do? A complete cut over on the release date of Silverlight?

As for Flash not working on 50% of sites on *ubuntu...I'm a developer who solely uses Kubuntu at home and have had an issue in possible 0.05% of cases I'd estimate. It certainly isn't as polished as the Win implementation but 50% of sites (with no proper examples listed) has to be an outright lie.

As for the whining of Linux users about the Flash implementation...let's just say (myself included) most Linux users tend to be a LOT more vocal about these issues (as you would know) and I hardly think it's representative of the state of the product.

Try to tone down the sensationalism next time with the headline. Sure you'll get less clicks, but you'll also get less negative comments.

Glad to hear this. Microsoft doesn't need to be everything to everybody. Its bad enough they have the corner for browsers. I for one am glad they're using Adobe software Flash instead of Silverlight!

Here is the reponse
http://blog.dennyboynton.com/post/Why-is-Microsoft-So-Slow-to-Adopt-Silverlight.aspx