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Comment by stormideas | Hacker News Reader

I took the decision to develop using Silverlight becuase I've got a strong background in using the Microsoft stack for development, wanted to get in on the ground floor with a new technology and follow it as it matures and becuase I wanted to (try!) to produce a richer user experience within the browser.

As I said, I understand that this is going to be a limiting factor in some regards, but I couldn't have built what I did in any other technology (that's not to say that someone else couldn't have, just for my particular circumstances).

I'm hopeful that as Silverlight adoption increases this will become less of a problem, I'm also hopeful that colaab may act as a showcase for my Silverlight abilities and lead to further contract work, which in turn can help to fund product development.

Thanks for the feedback!

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Silverlight will be bundled into all versions of Windows from now on so you won't have to worry about adoption.

Will that work in firefox/safari/opera on windows?

Also, the web isn't composed of windows machines. It's a mishmash of a billion different devices. The vast majority of which, know html, javascript, and not much else. Seems a bad idea to only write for a small subset of them.

Well, I'm a Mac user running Safari. Do I mind installing a free plug-in to get access to an interesting app? No.

I don't see where you (necessarily) get "small subset" from.

You don't mind potentially making safari crash more? You don't mind adding to complexity, disk space used, memory usage, potential vulnerabilities?

I do. The less "installed" software I have to go wrong, the better.

I don't mind making Safari 'potentially crash more' - I only mind if it actually does crash more. Since Safari crashes are very few and far between, and haven't noticeably increased since I installed Silverlight some time ago, this potential problem isn't high on my list of priorities.

I suppose I can always go back to Lynx if these things really bother me too much.

I've used Silverlight on Firefox (Vista, Windows 7) with no problems, not even having to restart the browser.

Silverlight is actually pretty good; it's a much easier experience for developers than Flash/Flex. You might hate Microsoft, but you shouldn't hate the tech.

it's hard not to hate the tech when historically MS makes their stuff ignore standards and evolve into something for Windows only.

Adobe, while not perfect itself, has been committed to keeping Flash cross platform. This makes Flash harder to hate than Silverlight despite the high cost of developer tools

IE is still 70% of traffic. So, if you write something in Silverlight, and IE maintains that, you're going to work in 70% + however many non-IE clients have Silverlight or are willing to get it.

That will be most everyone. People will do just about anything you ask them to. The prevalence of phishing has proven that. They'll put their online banking creds into any site that has bankofamerica somewhere in the domain name. They'll buy Viagra from an anonymous email through a Costa Rican pharmacy. They'll most certainly click the button that says "Install Silverlight from Microsoft to watch the video".

If using Silverlight helps you do things that would have been harder otherwise, great.

But the other reasons are silly unless someone is paying you to increase Silverlight usage.

The difference between a biz and a hobby is that biz try hard to avoid doing things that don't help the bottom line.

Where do you live? I'll hire you ;)

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