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Comment by nbevans | Hacker News Reader

Bear in mind this project was started around the same time there was a ton of uncertainty around the future of Silverlight and WPF. Alas, one did die, one lives on for now. But nobody knew that at the time, including Intel, or apparently Microsoft. WinForms has never faced any forward compatibility uncertainty so it is a good long-term bet.

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It's also a compelling choice if you need to operate in a resource-constrained environment. I don't know what kind of hardware is in Hawking's system nowadays, but back when this was first being built a low-power portable system that runs a higher-activity WPF UI smoothly could have been fairly expensive.

You mean Silverlight died? I've seen that said over the years, but:

A) Microsoft still mantains and updates silverlight.

B) It's mentioned as one of the components of Windows 10[1].

So I'm really confused here as whether Microsoft will kill it already, or keep it alive. They seem to be willing to kill it[2][3], but Netflix alone is enough reason to keep it alive.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp...

[2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-includ...

[3] http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-its-new-edg...

Dead can mean different things. Often it just means dead-end technology in the sense that MS does not intend to develop the technology further. Since MS have a strong focus on backwards compatibility, dead-end technologies often can keep running a very long time. VB6 for example is clearly a dead-end technology, but nobody prevents you from running and even developing VB6 apps.

Silverlight has been a dead-end technology for some time, but it will continue to be supported in Internet Explorer in "legacy mode". You can still run ActiveX-controls in IE (in legacy mode), so expect to be able to run Silverlight apps for the foreseeable future.

Netflix supports HTML5, they don't "need" Silverlight. https://gigaom.com/2014/11/26/netflix-silverlight-chrome/ https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Running Firefox 41 and it still loads the Silverlight plugin and explicitly asks for it if disabled... Also, Netflix needing Silverlight drove the development of Pipelight for Linux: http://pipelight.net/cms/about.html

It got my attention that Chrome supports HD "up to" 720p, unlike the rest that get up to 1080p. Why would that be?

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