Microsoft’s Silverlight, end of Flash supremacy?
Though I tend to avoid Flash for several reasons, there is no doubt that this is one of the best Web technology I have seen, perhaps the only technology of it’s class. How can you ignore that when 70% of Web 2.0 users are serious fans of those video sharing sites, where Flash runs the show. Microsoft Corp, maybe annoyed by the “Adobe” chant in the Web 2.0 world, but now they’ve come up with “Silverlight” to deliver rich media applications on the Web.
Yes it may be true that 80% of computer user’s desktops are one way or another dominated by Microsoft, but when it comes to the Web, Microsoft’s plays a leading lady role at best. Perhaps going after Adobe’s biggest success “Flash”, is just a sign of Microsoft’s preparation for a Web domination campaign. Anyway “Silverlight”, is a browser plugin that will allow Web content providers/publishers to offer rich video and interactive media experiences directly within their Web sites. Wondering which browser? According to an official statement issued by Microsoft (unable to find the resource at the time of writing this post), Silverlight will be compatible with Internet explorer, Firefox and Opera initially.
Silverlight, formerly code-named WPF/E uses the same technology which leverages Vista’s new graphics framework Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). As you can guess, Microsoft’s key target audience/consumer group are content providers that want to distribute video and rich media over the Web, designers and developers who build rich media content or applications and last but not the least, end users. Until now almost all of the news sites like Cnet, ZDnet, Reuter’s etc. use Adobe’s Flash as the key technology to show interactive media/content. Microsoft’s Silverlight objective is to take away that dominance. Obviously Silverlight has the good looks and an abundance of creativity enrichment.
The coolest part of “Silverlight” is that it delivers a similar user experience on both IE 7 running on Windows Vista and Firefox running on an Apple Mac computer. This means it is OS independent (cross-platform) and more importantly, end users will not have to download different video player technologies to view online media based on what OS they are running. Well that is one feature that Adobe Flash doesn’t have.
Here are some of the cool features of Silverlight
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It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh.
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Silverlight and HTML integrate seamlessly together. Every XAML element can be accessed or manipulated from the same client-side JavaScript that would be used to interact with any DHTML element: there are no artificial boundaries or barriers, and you can even overlay HTML elements on top of Silverlight content (simply by creating a windowless frame).
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Full runtime interactivity with Silverlight generated content. The content of the XAML file can be completely server-side generated.
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Silverlight is blindingly fast – trust me it is. You just go and play the same video with Flash and Silverlight and you will see.
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Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text.
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This one is the coolest of all: Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace†required. Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.
There was no indication if “Silverlight” will be able to eliminate the key accessibility issue of Flash objects that is to say the lack of device independent navigation. In Adobe Flash created objects, you can bring good looks, but you can’t bring device independent navigation/control, you need a mouse for that. I’m hoping they have an answer for this. We’ll just have to want and see the final product.
Microsoft delivered a beta of Silverlight at its MIX 2007 conference at the end of April. So have your fingers crossed and wait to see the battle of rich media content generators 
.
Perhaps our friends at mydeo can tell us more.
4 Responses to “Microsoft’s Silverlight, end of Flash supremacy?”
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Hi there, yes we’ve been working with it for while so hopefully there’s a little to add – although we haven’t bitten the device independent navigation bullet just yet. The first thing it offers us is a massive amount more control of the presentation layer around video, along with the inherent benefits of the Windows Media Format and streaming rather than the impractically expensive Flash streaming. The old WMP takes a while to load up the stack and get going but Silverlight makes the whole experience, and your control of it far, far better. Making it actually work on a Mac is a massive boost and my army of friends with Macs might actually consider something other than Quicktime.
The first version that’s in Beta now is Silverlight 1.0, which relies on JavaScript in the browser and is focussed more on media delivery than more advanced applications, is set for full release in the summer. Version 1.1 is more exciting for the techies because of its inclusion of the Common Language Runtime and the ability to build applications using .NET rather than Javascript but will likely take till the end of the year to materialise.
From a ui point of view there’s a lot more you can do with video, you can pretty much treat it like any other screen element – there’s even a brush which allows you to ‘paint’ with the video. I haven’t seen a lot of useful applications of this yet but there was an amusing demo at Mix07 where they broke down a live stream of the audience like a jigsaw puzzle where you could drag the pieces around as you please…
There’s also pretty simple interaction with the media content itself – you can access the timeline simply and use that to interact with other elements on the page which opens up plenty of opportunities… Run out of time.. must dash…
Iain…
Thanks Iain for your valuable input. Silverlight obviously superior than flash in terms of inter portability.
But while Silverlight does interact with JavaScript — the component of AJAX that is known to be vulnerable to XSS attacks. So security will be scarce up until inclusion of the Common Language Runtime.
I am interested to know if people out there think this really is a rival to Flash. It seems a big statement as Flash has years of experience ahead of it. Do we think this is just Microsoft PR, or is there actually some substance behind it all?
Caroline – in a nutshell; I think and hope it will give flash a run for it’s money. I personally hate flash based upon its reliance on browser compatibly. I look forward to when Silverlight doesn’t rely on JavaScript.