Comment by rodh257 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rodh257 | Hacker News Reader

The headline is sensationalist and wrong. Think of it this way, Metro is their tablet/iPad mode. The iPad has no flash/silverlight in the browser, and neither does Metro IE. This in order to get the best tablet experience, battery life etc. The difference is, you can hit a button and open up full Windows desktop mode and get the full browsing experience, while accepting a tradeoff in battery life.

They aren't abandoning it, they're just optimizing for the use case. In fact, Silverlight developers should be happy - with some simple namespace changes, they demonstrated converting a silverlight program to a Metro UI on stage in the keynote. Sure your program may not run in the browser unless they swap to full desktop mode, but it will be easy for you to make it a proper installed application if you desire.

It's a good decision in my book, and will result in a better tablet experience. Frankly all the misinformation and hyperbole around this is getting exhausting. They've really not pulled the rug from under anyone at all.

> Think of it this way, Metro is their tablet/iPad mode.

That's not what the article says:

"The Metro-style browser is the full screen, chromeless implementation of Internet Explorer that most people are expected to use with Windows 8."

I have also read this elsewhere. Do you have a cite to back up your claim that Metro is tablet-only?

I read the tablet comment to mean that it was a reduced functionality version, not that it would be tablet only.

It's a contortion to imagine Silverlight developers being happy. There's no point in building Silverlight web applications if they won't work in the default browser mode on PC's. So what was supposed to be a pervasive framework for rich web applications is now one of many for an unproven platform. This is such a heavy deprecation that abandoning it can't be far away.

I don't think you realize that Silverlight is XAML, WPF is XAML and Metro is XAML. It's all the same stuff.

With relatively minor changes we'll be able to run our Silverlight or WPF XAML in Metro and _continue_ to be able to run it the desktop browser (via the Silverlight plugin on Windows or OS X) or out-of-browser as a desktop app (on Windows or OS X).

To think that this is a deprecation is the contortion.

If you have every ported WPF to Silverlight you will know the changes are not minor. They are similar but the differences are large enough to make things very difficult in anything but trivial applications.

You also cannot share assemblies directly, which makes code reuse a big pain, no word on whether WinRT will support normal assemblies, but it's runtime is stripped down just as Silverlights is so probably not.

I wonder if apple might do this with their iPad 3, i.e. include their full OS as an alternative.

With (reputed) quad-core and 2560x1600, there's sufficient power.

It's funny how when Apple did this with the iPad the cries of "no flash!" were deafening. Now "it is a good decision."

Apple doesn't allow plugins in their web browser. Microsoft is not allowing plugins in Metro. Flash on the web has existed for years, and not having plugins hurts end users because they experience the entire web. No plugins for something that doesn't exist yet hurts no one, because apps will be designed from the ground up without plugins. See the difference?

There were plenty of "it is a good decision" claims in Apple's case as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com