Ted has a great post on the shortcomings and mistakes of Silverlight. Some of the things he points out are obvious (Having 0% penetration is really problematic, although MS is of course going to bundle it with Windows/IE, but who uses them anyhow ;) ) , but there were a few big surprises (at least to me). For example, Silverlight does not stream. Ok, that makes sense, since it's not binary. But to me the killer was:
Silverlight does not have a scripting language built in, but uses the browsers JavaScript capabilities. Yeah, WTF? Welcome to debugging hell!
Of course, modern browsers are quite compatible, but to me it still means that I'll opt for my sanity and keep my hands of Silverlight (well, at least until it supports hardware-accelerated 3D on Mac)
Comments
Ted's post is good, so I'm not going to detract from it too much, but we haven't heard the entire story behind the language and building actual apps. They won't be able to compete with Flex in 1.0, but they make make some big strides. We should have a much better picture of how all this shapes up after MIX.
Posted by: Ryan Stewart | 23 Apr 2007 20:18:19
Hi Ryan, does it really matter at this point? I mean, would you use a superior programming language and IDE if the result could only be played back by 1% (at the moment) of potential users? In my view, penetration is all that matters if you don't have it. And when you don't have it, you're having the chicken-egg problem. Developers won't develop, since there's no installed user base, and users won't install because there's no developed applications. The only way to break free of the problem is to provide features in the runtime that are so cool that developers jump in even though they know there are no users. And Silverlight unfortunately brings nothing new to the table.
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 24 Apr 2007 09:23:22
The penetration issue will be interesting. If they flip on Windows Update, they get 80%+ penetration automatically, so they can hit the magic number. Even if they don't do that, they can promote the runtime via their web properties and partners and still come out well for a V 1.0 product.
Posted by: Ryan Stewart | 24 Apr 2007 15:41:21
"Silverlight does not have a scripting language built in"
You are so misinformed. Did you know that?!
Posted by: Andrei Rinea | 27 Jan 2008 01:24:29
Actually I'm not. Silverlight 1.0 relies on the underlying browser's JS engine. But Silverlight 1.1 does indeed have it's own embedded script engines (multiple)...
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 28 Jan 2008 10:42:55
