If Silverlight were installed just as often as Flash, would you use it over Flash? | Hacker News Reader

If Silverlight were installed just as often as Flash, would you use it over Flash?

16 pointsamichail33 comments

If not, why?

Do not want Silverlight.

Want javascript.

By the way, why don't you have a blog? You post some interesting stuff to your twitter sometimes, but it would take a few hours at most to set up a Wordpress site.

I have little patience for writing long blog posts. And I suspect most people have little patience for reading them.

In a way, twitter is a great equalizer, rewarding ideas over writing ability.

How about Posterous then?

That's not the point of this question.

It'd be a toss up, but I've been surprised by Silverlight. The recent implementation of Netflix streaming has been working without a hitch for me on Mac, and I like some of the concepts they've worked into Silverlight-- most notably the dynamic language support for things like IronPython.

The idea that I can code Python clientside, even .NET-ly, makes me happier. I haven't done much yet there, but it does raise my curiosity to avoid hacking around with Flex/ActionScript.

I think people probably would.

But I am of the opinion that Flash is slowly but surely dying in favour of JavaScript and related technologies. Flash still has its niche for streaming audio and video and a few other things that would be otherwise be a pain to write, but they don't really justify the existence of Silverlight which has largely marketed itself as "a better Flash".

This isn't entirely correct. If you're just talking about enhancing a web page, then ok sure Javascript is more widely used. However, if you're talking about building Rich Internet Applications, Flex is many lightyears ahead of what JavaScript has to offer.

How so? I mean, what can you accomplish with Flex that you can't also accomplish with modern javascript frameworks?

Try out some of the example applications at http://degrafa.org/samples/ and try to guess how long it would take you to write those samples using modern javascript frameworks vs how long it would take to write using Flex/Flash.

Sure. But comparatively few of those samples represent things that you would actually want to use in the real world, while there is a lot of overly shiny eye-candy, poor user interfaces and non-native widgets - things that Flash has always been notorious for.

Flash has always served a niche for what HTML and JavaScript can't easily do; the problem is that over time this is diminishing, and it's looking like over the long term Canvas and SVG will be one more nail in the coffin.

I never truly understood what Flex is all about. Could someone please elaborate?

Flex is many lightyears ahead of what JavaScript has to offer.

Then why are there overwhelmingly more Javascript apps than Flash ones?

I'd use neither. Both go against the open nature of the web.

It used to be a nightmare for viewing videos on the web.

This site needed Real, that site needed QuickTime, some other site needed Windows Media, and yet another site needed Some Bullshit Player 4 which only ran on Windows 98 on a good day.

Apple must have the last website that still requires a plugin, Quicktime, to view videos on their web pages. This seems odd since most of the videos are marketing related, and they are making it _harder_, not easier, to be marketed to. It doesn't matter how good the quality of quicktime is (if it is better), it's not a video if I can't watch it.

Never. The web was built on open standards, if we let somebody put a toll booth we're screwed.

what toll booth? Silverlight's implementation is open enough that the Mono project was able to clone it with moonlight. You can serve it from any server, too, not just IIS. In fact my buddy is serving it off of Apache.

I think you need to go back and look up the definition of 'open standard'. Someone figuring out how to reverse engineer one company's product implementation does not make that either 'open' or a 'standard'. What's needed is a written specification that is not subject to the whims of any single company and that anyone who wants to can build an implementation of.

I would ditch either or both of them in favor of a functional open-source media environment.

js + svg + ogg OR whatever

If you want me to take sides in your standards war give me something worth fighting for. Freedom.

rolls eyes I thought we were talking about watching video online not ending world hunger or tibetan oppression.

You know, transmitting video has proven to be a pretty important tool for fighting world hunger and various kinds of oppression; when it's possible to see the problems other people are experiencing, it's a lot easier to empathize with them. So it might not be a great idea to let one company decide how our video-transmitting technology is going to work and who gets to use which parts of it.

To be more concrete, imagine:

"The video you have selected ("russians_in_tskhinvili_getting_shelled.wmvx") is not viewable in your region ("Georgia"). Please contact your system vendor for a software upgrade if this region is not correct."

"New Adobe Explosion 2012 offers video content providers a usage-tracking feature, which provides accurate statistics on the age and gender breakdown of their viewing audience, enabling video content providers to micro-target advertising content. *Information about users' identities will not be disclosed except pursuant to an order from a court in one of the following jurisdictions: United States, China, India, Saudi Arabia, or Germany.)"

"The United States Trade Representative is pleased to announce a new accord with Brazil, addressing both American media companies' concerns related to rampant Brazilian internet piracy and the new Brazilian military government's concerns related to subversive content from overseas. Under the accord, effective starting 2Q 2011, only properly licensed video codec software from Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple will be permitted in Brazil."

"We're sorry, but the license for the software that created this audio file ("Grandpa Telling Us About His Mother.flvx") has expired. Please contact the content provider to request that they renew their license in order to access the content."

Small freedoms are important too.

Definitely Silverlight. I generally avoid Microsoft products, but the .NET framework trumps AIR any day.

Except that in silverlight you can't use the whole of .net, just a subset.

The .net framework that is included with silverlight has pretty much anything you would ever possibly need when running inside a sandboxed environment.

I would pick Flash for a number of reasons.

It has a lot better x-platform support for it's IDEs. This is important because if you are creating anything at all rich you are going to have designer and coders working on your stuff. Constraining them to a single platform reduces the amount of people who would be willing to work on it.

Flash also now has Flex which allows you to code and compile. Depending what you are doing this is great to have designers and developers on the same project.

Finally people are used to building stuff using the Flash IDE. While Silverlight might be the best thing since sliced bread I'd rather use a technology I know I can just find a contractor for in about 10 minutes.

If I were to choose the lesser evil of the two. I thinki it would be Flash. As it seems more "open" than Silverlight. I mean look at the amazing piece of software that is HaXe and the slew of true 3D flash applications on the internet.

IMHO I never knew what Flex is all about. Even going to their website it seems a bit vague to me. Learning MXML adds a layer of complexity that I'm not willing to work with. AIR OTOH seems promising though.

MXML is to HTML as ActionScript is to JavaScript.

No. MS is not as committed to the OSX platform as Adobe. Look at what happened to the Mac versions of MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer.

Would microsoft provide a binary for the iPhone? How about my custom browser on my odd cpu?

yes

I'm using it at work and absolutely hate it: if feels unfinished in almost every aspect. Try to use it yourself to do something nice and not simplicistic and you'll see it yourself.

Now it appears that only Microsoft's evangelist and members of the silverlight team are using it. All the blog postings/tutorials are posted by these people.

I feel that if a technology is naturally good you'll want to use it yourself, but this requires an army of payed bloggers to be pushed down the throats of developers.

Also, what problem is silverlight trying to solve? I feel it's trying to solve the i-dont-know-html problem in the end... well, i dont have it.

Not unless I need some feature in Silverlight or Flash that can't be accomplished by Javascript or Javascript based Framworks (e.g. Cappuccino). I just don't see the point of putting my users through the pain of installing them.

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