Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 142 posts

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#41

Post by beagle3 »

d4nt wrote: post #12

Until a year or two ago there was a stalemate as far as "rich web" development technologies goes. Neither flash, Silverlight or HTML5 was the clear winner. I remember people being incredulous that the iPad didn't support Flash, saying that while it might be ok for the iPhone to not support it, nobody would take the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash. In a way, I think it might be the combined weight of the iPh…

Stalemate?

Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3.

I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the time being, though not for long, Flash is still among the royalty). Silverlight had always been a wannabe.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#42

Post by forgotAgain »

WayneDB wrote: post #31
joelthelion wrote: post #5

Good riddance. And once again, all the companies that decided to rely on a proprietary, non standard technology are going to get bitten.

Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6. Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it. Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?

Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written. Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#43

Post by WayneDB »

rbanffy wrote: post #37
WayneDB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing apples to oranges. IE6 is a browser, Silverlight is a plug-in. Using Silverlight doesn't mean that you can't switch browsers.

As long as your browser supports the SL plugin.

Incorrect. Silverlight runs out of browser.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#44

Post by forgotAgain »

bchjam wrote: post #3

the Mary Jo Foley article this one loosely references is here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverli...

A tangent but why is "TheVerge" getting so much play on Techmeme's front page if it produces articles like this one?

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#45

Post by WayneDB »

rbanffy wrote: post #40
xradionut wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...

I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.

Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc)

Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#46

Post by elliottkember »

cryptoz wrote: post #21
DrJokepu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the meantime, there's no really reliable standard, cross-platform and cross-browser way to play back audio or video in the browser as major browser vendors still cannot agree on a single codec that would work everywhere.

That magical method of playing audio or video has never existed, though. The elimination of the Silverlight plugin (and mobile Flash!), neither of which were reliable cross platform/cross-browser, should speed up the efforts put in to finding such a perfect solution.

Hopefully. Unfortunately, any time anyone talks about cool new innovations in the browser, we have to use the word "hopefully".

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#47

Post by WayneDB »

forgotAgain wrote: post #42
WayneDB wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6. Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it. Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?

Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written. Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.

I wasn't saying that Silverlight reached the same market penetration as VB6. What I said was that Microsoft isn't going to take it away and make it not work. Like VB6, you'll still be able to run it if you want.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#48

Post by kree10 »

hkarthik wrote: post #10

I'm curious what Netflix has in the works to move off of Silverlight. I remember reading that their biggest problem with HTML5 players was the lack of good DRM options to please the studios.

What does Netflix use for their iOS app? That's not based on Silverlight is it?

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#49

Post by kenjackson »

jeswin wrote: post #27
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The branding might be going away, just like the Zune brand, but the core technologies are already part of the Windows 8 SDK.

Forget silverlight, .net itself has a questionable future on windows client. WinRT went back to C++. .NET is being positioned a server side technology.

It depens on what you consider .NET. The CLR? The .NET metadata schema? C#/VB? The only thing that isn't incredibly important in WinRT is the CLR proper. But the other aspects of .NET play a huge role in WinRT. They even went and largely reimplemented the BCL. And the API design guidelines across the board are .NET based. WinRT looks a million times more like .NET than Win32.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#50

Post by alecco »

pnathan wrote: post #36

It's a great day, both Flash and Silverlight are on the road to obsolete. I look forward to our new HTML5 overlord.

Well, now that you mention it...

SGML/HTML/XML/CSS/JS have the true open standard good side instead of anticompetitive proprietary grip. But let's not fool ourselves, those languages are terrible and backwards. Same with HTTP. Also HTML5 still falls short of many missing features on the web.

I'm hoping for a new generation of a better set of languages to take over. But this feels like hoping for x86 to go obsolete, even Intel couldn't kill it.

Post reply on HN