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Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 116 posts

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#41
post #16
post #8

I have Moonlight installed on Linux, so I checked "Yes" for lack of a "sorta" option. Moonlight seems to be good enough to get to the few Silverlight sites I need (several European TV broadcasters...)

...and not good enough to play the Feynman lectures billg bought and now serves in the Silverlight-only form. I think the reason is that there's no DRM handling in Moonlight. I expect that a lot of Silverlight content will remain inaccessible in Moonlight.

Now I feel less guilty for refusing to install Moonlight on my Ubuntu laptop and downloading Feynman lectures from isohunt torrents instead.

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#43

There are just so few sites that require Sliverlight that I find myself mildly offended when I come across one that tries to make me install it. Who are you, telling me to install something just to view your website? Good day, sir. Funny that that's never been my experience with Flash. Flash sites are horrible and I avoid them if I can, but Flash can socially engineer its way onto my machine through cool little in-br…

"Funny that that's never been my experience with Flash. Flash sites are horrible and I avoid them if I can, but Flash can socially engineer its way onto my machine through cool little in-browser games, whereas Silverlight just wants to "enhance" my viewing of MSDN."

I have played quite a few Silverlight games. Why the attitude towards something that adds more functionality?

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#45
post #41
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and not good enough to play the Feynman lectures billg bought and now serves in the Silverlight-only form. I think the reason is that there's no DRM handling in Moonlight. I expect that a lot of Silverlight content will remain inaccessible in Moonlight.

Now I feel less guilty for refusing to install Moonlight on my Ubuntu laptop and downloading Feynman lectures from isohunt torrents instead.

So I guess we can thank Bill Gates for personally financing ("Tuva project: powered by Silverlight") the nice argument to avoid Moonlight and Silverlight: there's still the DRM (not included in Moonlight) to worry about. Even if he fixes the mentioned site, I hope the awareness remains.

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#46

There are just so few sites that require Sliverlight that I find myself mildly offended when I come across one that tries to make me install it. Who are you, telling me to install something just to view your website? Good day, sir. Funny that that's never been my experience with Flash. Flash sites are horrible and I avoid them if I can, but Flash can socially engineer its way onto my machine through cool little in-br…

So far I only encountered 1 site that required silverlight to work (onet.pl public video streaming), I have linux, so I installed moonlight, it almost worked, but then I've learned that they also use some DRM that only works on Mac and Windows (also - it told me firefox is not supported :)).

For me using silverlight is like telling people to keep away.

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#49

The Steam hardware survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey now includes software, which includes Silverlight.

I think at one point the survey listed the number of samples; now it just seems to be percentages which isn't as useful. Anecdotally the survey has a lot of respondents (as in, a majority of the Steam userbase) but you never know.

Re: Poll: Do you have Silverlight installed?

#50
post #16
post #8

I have Moonlight installed on Linux, so I checked "Yes" for lack of a "sorta" option. Moonlight seems to be good enough to get to the few Silverlight sites I need (several European TV broadcasters...)

...and not good enough to play the Feynman lectures billg bought and now serves in the Silverlight-only form. I think the reason is that there's no DRM handling in Moonlight. I expect that a lot of Silverlight content will remain inaccessible in Moonlight.

I have found that it helps sometimes, but not always, to right click the Moonlight plugin and choose "install microsoft codecs" from the menu.
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