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What ever happened to Silverlight? Microsoft's plugin and development platform
TK lede :-)
What's telling is that Apple fans aren't clamoring for Silverlight on the iPhone, it's Flash that makes it's absense felt in many users daily web experience. Indeed I bought a new laptop in January of 2009 and it wasn't until recently, when I started using Netflix's on-demand streaming that I found it necessary to install Silverlight.
It wasn't that I had anything against Silverlight, but that I simply never needed it until that moment. And that's bad news for Microsoft.
Aside from Netflix and the recent Olympics streaming sites you'd be hard pressed to find a major site that's using Silverlight. Major League Baseball flirted with it, but quickly reverted to Flash. Billboard Live has a few videos in Silverlight, as do McDonalds and UFC, but watching Microsoft's Silverlight promo video one has the feeling that Microsoft has to troll far and wide to find examples to showcase.
What's doubly curious about Silverlights inability to gain ground is that in many ways it's far nicer than Flash. For example, the Netflix player, probably the example most people encounter Silverlight most frequently, never sends my laptop's fan into overdrive the way Flash-based Hulu movies do.
TK another example of Silverlight's advantages over Flash
From a developers point of view Silverlight also offers much that Flash lacks like the ability to [write apps in a variety of programming languages][1] and still compile down to code that will run in the Silverlight player.
Having written apps in both Flash and Silverlight the truth is Silverlight is much nicer. I can work in the language I prefer (IronPython in this case), develop without the need for a timeline or other animation oddities and build apps much faster thanks to a well-designed framework and API set.
With all the Python and Ruby on Rails developers out there you would think that Silverlight would be more compelling than Flash, which requires learning a whole new programming langauge. But it turns out Python and Ruby programmers don't seem to interested and Flash developer aren't interested in learning a new programming language either.
Developers did not rush to Silverlight in droves, nor did Flash programmers suddenly pick and decamp for Microsoft's new playground.
TK graf about early versions Silverlight failing to offer developers compelling features not found in flash
Part of Silverlight's failure to gain traction is that it arrived late in the game. Adobe routine touts statics showing somewhere between 90-95 percent of all web browsers have Flash installed. Silverlight can only dream of that sort of penetration.
The second problem Silverlight faces is a chicken and egg problem. Few sites use Silverlight because it's install base is much smaller than it's competitor Flash. But few people need to install Silverlight because few websites use it. Worse, perhaps the biggest chunk of users developers can rely on to have Silverlight installed -- Internet Explorer users -- are dwindling every day as Firefox and Google Chrome continue to steal users away from IE.
The third and perhaps most damaging for Silverlight is timing. Silverlight arrived as an alternative to Flash at the time when HTML5 was beginning to enjoy wider support among modern web browsers. Suddenly Silverlight needed to compete against not just the obvious, Flash, but also the very foundation of the web -- HTML 5.
While Silverlight is capable of much that remains just proposed ideas for HTML5 (and much that HTML5 will never have) it suffers from the perception that it is just another plugin in an atmosphere where even the most dominant plugin is the punching bag of standards advocates everywhere.
Essentially Silverlight is a better widget in a world that's trying ditching widgets entirely.
[1]: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/dynamic-languages/
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