Microsoft unleashes Silverlight 4 beta Microsoft has unveiled major and long-awaited basic features in the next version of Silverlight, hoping to take on AJAX and Adobe Systems' Flash. Om Wednesday, the company announced Silverlight 4, which has been designed to simplify both the development and consumption of rich-media applications and content by programmers and …
Silverlight 4 "programmatically tied into the computer" - sounds like it'll either be heaving with DRM / WGA, or it'll only run on Win 7 ("We're gonna make you upgrade from XP one way or another...muhahahahaha!") - so anyone using Macs and Linux can forget Silverlight.
Not that anybody worth their while actually uses it (*cough* ITV *cough*), as Adobe's Flash has been around for what seems like forever and is seemingly everywhere.
IE9: Balance between standards compliance and "real world" usage.
Excuse-moi? You can achieve a full "real world" multimedia experience whilst remaining standards compliant. I suppose what they mean by "real world" is "backwards compatibility with all the crud we piled into all previous versions of IE".
Now, choice of icon... Thumbs down, Stop, FAIL, Flame, Grenade, Badgers or Evil Bill? I'll go for FAIL as it's already destined to be one :)
Microsoft don't really get the point. If they did support the standards, then the standards would be Real World Usage. As it is, using things like canvas is not really practical due to IE being crap, hence they'd say that canvas is not a feature that has Real World Usage.
What they really mean is that they want you to use Silverlight and will drag their heals about for as long as possible about supporting any web standards.
I think they do get the point. Very very well.
IE is in decline right now, but if it ever surged, then we could see a return to IE only web pages again. Not possible if everybody gets used to writing one page for all browsers.
Microsoft have built an empire on introducing their own formats for their own reasons, and their own advantage.
What the flip is Sliverlight anyway? It keeps popping up on the Windows update thing, I keep ignoring it, my internet and everything keeps on working
So why should I install it?
M$ say it's for a rich multimedia web experience (or some other BS), Youtube works, internet radio works, what huge part of the internet am I missing out on by not installing Silverlight?
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Silverlight. As a member of a company who develops Bi applications for enterprise partners, there is a lot of power to the Silverlight model that you can't get out of the limited programming model you get with the likes of Flash.
Having the power of the .NET framework behind the scenes makes it possible to write much more complex web apps for business scenarios that would otherwise have to be written as a desktop app which would need to be installed everywhere it is needed, something that in my experience is a pain in the arse.
Sure, Silverlight will probably never challenge Flash when it comes to the "consumer" web, graphical adverts and beautiful designer websites but it definitely has a place in the business world in providing rich internet applications that can be accessed anywhere. I am not sure if the extra level of local computer access will work 100% with the mac version of Silverlight but version 4 also includes many other useful features that will certainly make the lives of developers like me a lot easier!
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