First, here is a link to Microsoft's new technology for online media broadcast.
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
As the site says itself, "Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
Well, although my title does not sound positive, let us begin with what is good about Silverlight.
Why is it promising ?
The first thing that impressed me with Silverlight is the size of the plug-in. It is really a lightweight module that we have to download to get started. I think the video quality is fairly good but that is not all to Silverlight although most of the attention is focused on its media capability. It can also serve as a basis for a visually rich user interface running on a web browser.
It is true that Silverlight is an answer to Adobe's Flash (Flash was developed by Macromedia which has merged with Adobe). However, as one of my colleague said, Flash/Flex provides a very rich thin client application environment but it is pretty well self contained. Flash is indeed a very nice technology and can be used to develop an independent application (which makes it self-contained).
On the other hand, Silverlight is a good example Microsoft's true strength : Integration. On Microsoft's website dedicated, it says : Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.. This can be achieved only with high-level integration and this is something I have already experienced when I had to use Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX to enhance a web application that was already deployed. In this way, my colleague stated that Silverlight can be used to build applications formed of many other controls such as straight HTML, ASP.Net as at present, client-side Javascript programming, etc... Thus, this will allow developers maximum flexibility for designing UI.
Cross-browser : maybe, Cross-platform : don't make me laugh...
Enough of the nice writing, let us get down to critics.
First, it is true that Sliverlight is cross-browser as it supports IE6 & 7 of course but
also Firefox and Safari, with support for Opera on its way. Is it enough ? Who knows but I will admit that those browsers make most of market nowadays.
However, I believe it is wrong to call it cross-platform even if Silverlight supports Mac-based systems (Mac systems come with Safari as a browser). To me, there are two reasons :
- Microsoft is a shareholder of Apple (5% of the shares if memory serves right) and the main reason for MS to keep Apple "alive" is to avoid antitrust lawsuit in the US.
- No Linux support : as a Linux supporter, I would go as far as to say that calling Silverlight cross-platform is a lie. Of course, from a business point of view, Microsoft does not have to (and better not) support Linux since Linux is a direct competitor, which I completely understand. But I do not agree on calling Silverlight cross-platform while it is obviously not. I cannot watch Silverlight videos from Linux (KUbuntu) using Firefox...
Of course, I do not worry about getting access to Silverlight contents from Linux. I know that open-source projects are on their way (like Mono). But this is something Microsoft should take care of themselves if they want to truly call it cross-platform. However, Microsoft announced it would release the source code to part of its Silverlight technology, which is a first but not sufficient step
Final thoughts
I still think that Silverlight has a lot of potential. It is technically a very good product and its integration with Microsoft's development/graphic tools will make the transition easier for programmers and designers. However, there is no reason for me to call it cross-platform yet.
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