Silverlight is the next decade's IE6

paulstovell.com

10 points·joshsharp··7 comments

Aside from Netflix and MSN/Bing HD Video, and microsoft.com, how much has actually been done with Silverlight, really? My impression of Silverlight, admittedly subjective, has been that it has largely been a failure, and has seen very little adoption in the corporate world.

If this observation is accurate, then there is no way that Silverlight can be the next IE 6, simply because the adoption rate is so very small.

My understanding is that Silverlight is being used pretty heavily by some organizations to build basic internal web apps. They aren't using features that HTML doesn't have, instead they just want the data-binding features of silverlight and to stick to XAML/C#. This may be cost effective in the short run, but the author has a point. In five to ten years, these apps are going to seem incredibly outdated and browser support is not guaranteed.

And then the important part: employees will be forced to use IE12 (or whatever) because Chrome 25 & Firefox 6 don't support silverlight, which will slow adoption of html6.

Of course, the same exact argument could be made about Flash.

Of course. But which one is far more niche? At least the large market share of Flash means support won't disappear overnight.

Actually, no, because Flash Player is backwards compatible but according to this article Silverlight is not.

I'm hoping soon that everyone one will learn that technologies never die because of a part of it becomes obsolete. Sure, silverlight started as a plugin for web browsers, but it has evolved beyond that.

Please stop equating silverlight to mean web only. Silverlight is actually a nice multiplatform application to make desktop applications in, that can also run within a browser.

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