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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.

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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"

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