Silverlight 4 Beta Hits the Street

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:13:22 GMT

The beta for Silverlight 4 was released today, Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft

re: Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street

AC — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:03:03 GMT

Sorry but the handful of sites that do actually use Silverlight use 2.0 - this (the 1.0 release) may seem significant but if Microsoft is serious about SL on Linux then it needs to 'help' more. SL on Linux will always suck and a version behind the Windows version.

Except of the PR department (and by extension this site) can talk about interop and good will all day - it doesn't fix anything.

Just as with OWA/IE - there is a reason the "Premium mode" can only be used with IE, even though the other browser are technically far more advanced.

re: Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street

Ian M — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:45:27 GMT

Also, +1 for OGG/Theora support (as poster "fluke" mentioned).

re: Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street

fluke — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:58:48 GMT

Scott Guthrie's group has been busy but seems to be more of a sign of Microsoft's failure to work with the community than a success. I have been an advocate for keeping up with software updates. For GNU/Linux distributions there is transparency with updates. They will even go as far as to back-port fixes to maintain avoid unexpected changes in functionality unless it update also changes the distribution version number itself. Microsoft has had a policy of using Windows Logo Compliance to help get third parties to provide a uniform user experience. Most applications for Windows are expected to work with the standard control panel applet for uninstalling. Despite Microsoft's attempts to vocalize a transparent set of policies, Windows Update still remains a scape-goat for breaking things. However, in the Feb 2009 update, it appears that Scott Guthrie's group has taken steps to help earn that scapegoating. They silently install a .Net ClickOnce add-on to Firefox and gray-out the normal method of uninstalling it. Oddly enough, the Firefox community already had been working on a solution for .Net ClickOnce on Firefox called FFClickOnce. This pre-existing Firefox add-on could be installed using the standard Firefox add-on options, the feedback/review system was via the standard Firefox add-on website and it uninstalled using the standard Firefox method. Overall, FFClickOnce honored the Microsoft policy of providing a uniform user experience. The .Net team (and by extension Microsoft Windows Update) have chosen a non-standard route for installing Firefox add-ons, information regarding the add-on does not appear anywhere on the Firefox add-on website and it refuses to honor the standard method of uninstalling. Members of the blogging community which also use .Net developer tools where already complaining about the need to modify the Windows registry to uninstall the Microsoft ClickOnce add-on before it was even pushed out as part of Windows Update. Those complaints seem to have been ignored by Guthrie's team.

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On the topic of Silverlight, the .Net team seems to also ignore codecs which are popular among the FOSS community such as Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, Theora and Dirac. It also seems to provide no method for a third-party to add codecs. In this way, Silverlight seems to be a step backwards from interoperability with existing authoring tools from the functionality that WMP provided.