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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

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-browser games, whereas Silverlight just wants to "enhance" my viewing of MSDN.

I think Microsoft's BizSpark site actually requires Silverlight, so once every year or so, one of my machines gets to install it so that I can renew my MSDN subscription and get the latest version of VS.NET. That's enough of a reason for me, since it's something I absolutely can't do without, but I couldn't imagine expecting my users to install it just to visit my website.

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I have it because one of the few sites (netflix) uses it to keep movies full screen on my secondary monitor. Flash will automatically kick back to the original window size whenever doing a user action on another monitor.

Bing Maps requires Silverlight for some features. I found that out when I tried Bing recently, but found that Microsoft is more interested in pushing their own technology than pushing their search engine.

Microsoft also recently did a project with NASA that requires Silverlight. Thanks, Microsoft.

To be fair, if you wrote a browser plugin like Silverlight, wouldn't you do the majority of your projects in it?

The effort to port it to Flash or JavaScript as a fallback mechanism is hardly a major undertaking for a company like Microsoft.

That they're doing this when that means blocking out a huge portion of users on Bing Maps when their main competitor has no such portability problems I think says a great deal about their priorities.

You can't port Silverlight to Flash or Javascript because Flash and Javascript don't provide direct system access needed to emulate many of Silverlight's features.

the SL enabled Bing Maps is amazing. Try it if you haven't. - hit the 3D button.

Does it work on Ubuntu with Moonlight? I don't have any machine with a proprietary OS.

That's not Silverlight. It doesn't work on Mac. IE makes you download a setup file for "3D Bing Maps" app.

hit the 3D button -- "not supported on Chrome"

Ryanairs route map requires Silverlight. I wonder if whatever Microsoft paid for that is more than lost revenue from customers exploring potential destinations.

Ryanair probably don't care. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if they chose it purposefully to make things difficult. The more hoops you're willing to jump through, the more they can generally get away with. Plus never underestimate the lengths people will go to for a £1 flight (I include myself in that, even though every part of my being tells me I'm being ridiculous).

Ryanair just saw it as free money... they do not need customers exploring potential destinations, their customers know where they want to go, and they want to go there for cheap.

I say this is half in jest, but wonder how much of that is true.

i second this. if i have to install silverlight for a web app that'd be something els.. but silverlight on a public website is an offence.

flash is too to some degree.

somehow i think they will both not survive this decade.

"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?

It's the "why" that makes it funny for me. I have no idea why I mind Flash less than Silverlight. It certainly has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Maybe it's that there's already a Flash. And I already downloaded it and installed it. If you want to give me Flash-like content, go nuts, but do it with the Flash that I already have. There's no real reason to have built a second one, so I don't see any reason why I should have to install it. So I don't.

For a .net developer, using silverlight to tie into things they already have makes a lot more sense than flash which would result in a somewhat parallel code base in something completely different.

I guess if silverlight was the accepted plugin and flash was the newer player your feelings would be reversed.

Ah, but as developers our opinions don't matter at all. It's all about what our end-users want, and they clearly don't wan't to install Silverlight. The fact that it's 10x easier for me as a C# guy to write my thing against Silverlight has exactly zero bearing on my decision to build a product in it. Users won't install it, so it's just bad business to build software for it.

And yes, naturally, if the other thing was the accepted thing, I would be happy to accept it and not the other one. Like I say, there's no bias against one or the other. I (and seemingly everybody) simply don't want both.

I guess in a way it's aimed at enterprise custom stuff, a company running a .NET app can get it turned into a web app far cheaper with silverlight. That's the only place I have been exposed to it while interning. I personally wouldn't use it for anything but am happy to install the plugin as long as it doesn't noticeably degrade performance.

What if Silverlight performs better in the long run and uses less resources than HTML5 and Flash? I would prefer to see a war between Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5.

Sure open standards and all but the user may prefer something totally different. They may not want the fans on the back of their computer to spin up every time they go to an interactive website.

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.

Greetings to a fellow Pole. <Borat's Voice>"Jak sie masz?"</Borat's Voice>

:) Greetings to you too.

Funny that ten years ago some of our website visitors complained about requiring javascript to use the site ;-)

JavaScript never required proprietary development tools

AFAIK netflix requires silverlight nowadays.

I believe netflix PC streaming requires silverlight, but I know their general site doesn't. The silverlight requirement for streaming probably isn't something people usually even notice, since they also stream to roku, xbox, ps3, and a ton of televisions have the ability built-in.

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