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Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

193 points by exDM69 15y ago

Interesting announcements from Adobe and Microsoft, one after another.

viggity 15y ago
I "get" it when it comes to silverlight for public facing websites. Really. I do. The general populace doesn't want to have to install a plugin. But what about intranet apps? Silverlight is so incredibly easy to work with (compared to html/css/js) that there are lots of companies that have built intranet apps with it because they control the end point. I really hope this isn't true.
- kstrauser 15y ago
  A lot of companies that said the same about ActiveX are still limping along with IE6. I'd rather ask my boss to budget for more development time than to suggest rolling out a single-platform solution in 2011. The takeaway is this: don't build your mission critical internal apps on a Microsoft browser plugin. This has never worked out well.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > But what about intranet apps? Remember when IE6 was so incredibly easy to work with? Remember how much effort has been dedicated to port those internal "web applications" that worked on one specific browser?
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    You're comparing apples to oranges. IE6 is a browser, Silverlight is a plug-in. Using Silverlight doesn't mean that you can't switch browsers.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      As long as your browser supports the SL plugin.
      - WayneDB 15y ago
        Incorrect. Silverlight runs out of browser.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Oh... You mean using Silverlight for intranet applications without a browser... That's an interesting idea. Allow me not to take part on it.
        WayneDB 15y ago
        You're allowed. I'm also allowed to not be held hostage by a "standards committee" that never gets anything done.
        nailer 15y ago
        Wouldn't you say HTML is at least partially done?
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        rbanffy 15y ago
        You know you are hostage of a company that may discontinue the technology you depend on any moment they want, right?
        WayneDB 15y ago
        I prefer being hostage to Microsoft rather than Apple, the Gnome team or the KDE team. Outside of building your own OS and your own user interface, you only have slightly more of a degree of freedom with 'nix. At least my master gives me a 'created-date' field on every file. Gosh, that makes sense. I'd have to write my own file-system or use some outdated, unsupported crap to have that on 'nix.
- arctangent 15y ago
  But why require your developers to learn another set of technologies? Much better IMHO to just have a good web development team who can make internal applications too.
  - mweimer 15y ago
    I think most corporations already have people with C#/XAML skills.
    - arctangent 15y ago
      The odds are much higher that they have some in-house web developers.
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    Oh, so everybody should just do HTML no matter what, from now on, for ever and ever, amen? Nobody should ever invent a competing technology because HTML is good enough for you? Is that it?
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      > Nobody should ever invent a competing technology As long as this technology is easy and free for everyone to implement in compatible ways, yes, you can.
      - hvs 15y ago
        "You can" implies that you have some sort of say in the matter. Why should everyone have to implement technologies that are "easy and free" just because you say so?
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Good point. You can, but you shouldn't. And I won't use it or encourage its use. In fact, I'll speak against it on every opportunity I have.
- sunchild 15y ago
  One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers without painting yourself into yet another proprietary corner.
  - xradionut 15y ago
    Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...
    - WayneDB 15y ago
      This is exactly the problem. HTML/CSS/JS is disgusting to someone who knows the power of a good native SDK. People who only do web dev just don't know what quality is.
      - joelthelion 15y ago
        Quality is also your stuff running on anyone's computer, and not depending on a big company that has the power to kill your stuff and force you to rewrite it.
        WayneDB 15y ago
        Sure. That's nice about HTML, but too bad you lose almost every other quality thing because of it. I don't understand why everyone is so hung up on HTML though. The internet is not HTML, the internet is TCP/IP and all the protocols that ride on it like HTTP. Why can't we just leave HTML the way it is, use it primarily for making nice documents and come up with something new for apps? You know, instead of trying to shoe-horn everything into a spec that has to cover both apps and documents or anything in-between? Why isn't there a standards committee for a kit like Silverlight or Flash? The runtime would have to be built once for each platform, but that's no different than HTML.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.
- notatoad 15y ago
  an intranet is the sign of a lazy IT department. put that stuff up on the internet, let employees access the resources they need wherever they are, from whatever device they are using. every discussion i've ever seen about advancing the state of the web, the sticking point has always been "what about intranet/corporate networks?". well, if you run an intranet, fuck you. stop using the idea that you control the endpoint as an excuse to write crappy apps. you shouldn't be controlling that end point, you should be giving your users freedom to access your services in as many ways as possible rather than limiting their productivity by restricting their usage to your approved endpoints.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Not that simple. There are tons of rules and regulations businesses may have to follow. Some data may never leave company premises. Some data may never leave the room it exists.
    - notatoad 15y ago
      if data can't leave the room and it's on your network, you are in violation of that policy whether you have an intranet or an internet. security policies like those are stupid, and an artifact of a time before networks. we shouldn't have to build our networks around outdated policies, security policy should be built to accommodate the technologies of the time.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        We don't have anything like that here - we don't do top secret stuff - but, in that case, the machine wouldn't be on the network.
jrydberg 15y ago
I wonder what will happen to Microsoft Smooth Streaming if this happens.
- ypcxz 15y ago
  I wonder why isn't W3C / Google / whoever doing more to bring / standardize proper video streaming support to HTML5. I mean the HTTP progressive download support e.g. in Chrome is almost like streaming, but it's not the same.
bchjam 15y ago
the Mary Jo Foley article this one loosely references is here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverlight-6-and-does-it-matter/11180?tag=mantle_skin;content http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverli...
- forgotAgain 15y ago
  A tangent but why is "TheVerge" getting so much play on Techmeme's front page if it produces articles like this one?
tcarnell 15y ago
they should have probably made this decision before starting the first release!
joelthelion 15y ago
Good riddance. And once again, all the companies that decided to rely on a proprietary, non standard technology are going to get bitten.
- DrJokepu 15y ago
  In the meantime, there's no really reliable standard, cross-platform and cross-browser way to play back audio or video in the browser as major browser vendors still cannot agree on a single codec that would work everywhere.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    That magical method of playing audio or video has never existed, though. The elimination of the Silverlight plugin (and mobile Flash!), neither of which were reliable cross platform/cross-browser, should speed up the efforts put in to finding such a perfect solution.
    - elliottkember 15y ago
      Hopefully. Unfortunately, any time anyone talks about cool new innovations in the browser, we have to use the word "hopefully".
- WayneDB 15y ago
  Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6. Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it. Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?
  - forgotAgain 15y ago
    Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written. Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.
nailer 15y ago
Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.
  - apaprocki 15y ago
    That isn't what I've heard (from people still at Microsoft). Everything points to Silverlight and WPF being frozen because the teams are pretty much broken up at this point. Also, this is pretty clear as well: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      The branding might be going away, just like the Zune brand, but the core technologies are already part of the Windows 8 SDK.
      - moonchrome 15y ago
        What core technology - XAML & .NET ? AFAIK WinRT is a rewrite and is not compatible with WPF & Silverlight. Silverlight (cross-platform RIA plugin) seems dead.
        loarabia 15y ago
        Certainly Win8 and Windows Phone are not binary compatible with WPF and Silverlight but if you wander around the portion of msdn dedicated to Metro apps or to phone development and look at the available types and methods from the core runtime up to the presentation layer you can see that the common overlap is very large and that they probably started from the same place.
hkarthik 15y ago
I'm curious what Netflix has in the works to move off of Silverlight. I remember reading that their biggest problem with HTML5 players was the lack of good DRM options to please the studios.
- sjwright 15y ago
  Someone needs to explain to the studios about how computers are really great at copying stuff, which means DRM only ever has to be broken once by one person, and it doesn't matter if it's Netflix or Blu-ray or HBO. The only thing Netflix needs to do is make it inconvenient to rip the stream, i.e. more difficult than downloading the same thing as a torrent. Anything more is pointless.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    No, Netflix has to prove that they aren't the point of failure. Which means DRM is a requirement. Content owners demand it.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  Why would they want to move off something that works? The plugins will be getting security updates after all.
  - lallysingh 15y ago
    .. fixes for OS updates? Comparability with newer drivers?
  - nobody3141592 15y ago
    One code stream for obsolete windows a different one for new windows, another for iPhone/OSX, another for Android......
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Likely what they do on every other platform already; a sandboxed HTML5 "native" app. They could also take the NaCl route like they do for ChromeOS; but I don't think NaCl is available in plugin form yet (not that it matters for Win8; plugins of any kind are verboten in Metro mode)
hello_moto 15y ago
Wonder what will happen to NetFlix for web. Fallback to Flash I'm guessing...
- feintruled 15y ago
  They already have a HTML5 client, created for the PS3: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-user.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-...
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    Are Netflix's streaming videos DRM'd? On a closed system like the PS3, an HTML5 video player might be possible, but how would they protect their video in a HTML5 video player on a desktop computer? DRM'd desktop video seems like a good opportunity for Flash and Silverlight since HTML5 is unlikely to offer might DRM support.
    - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
      Just because your app is HTML5 doesn't mean you have to run it in a browser. Just like on phones, drop a WebView in and you're set. IIRC, Spotify actually uses Chromium in some capacity on their native client.
d4nt 15y ago
Until a year or two ago there was a stalemate as far as "rich web" development technologies goes. Neither flash, Silverlight or HTML5 was the clear winner. I remember people being incredulous that the iPad didn't support Flash, saying that while it might be ok for the iPhone to not support it, nobody would take the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash. In a way, I think it might be the combined weight of the iPhone and iPad that's broken the stalemate in HTML5's favour. Apple sold so many of them, that website makers had to take notice. When Microsoft announced that Windows 8 metro mode (which may well be the only mode available for low power Win8 tablets) would not support Silverlight, I think the game was well and truly up.
- eli 15y ago
  It doesn't help that Flash was deficient in a variety of ways. I think this was Adobe's fight to lose.
- beagle3 15y ago
  Stalemate? Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3. I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the time being, though not for long, Flash is still among the royalty). Silverlight had always been a wannabe.
  - d4nt 15y ago
    I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice. EDIT: I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.
    - beagle3 15y ago
Hov 15y ago
If I were them, I would re-focus it as a LOB app platform. That's where it really shines. As for WPF, it serves no purpose whatsoever.
platonichvn 15y ago
It's unfortunate but it was inevitable. HTML 5 is definitely the future. Although, the ability to write an app using type-safe, object oriented code that can run on both the client and server was very compelling.
pnathan 15y ago
It's a great day, both Flash and Silverlight are on the road to obsolete. I look forward to our new HTML5 overlord.
- alecco 15y ago
  Well, now that you mention it... SGML/HTML/XML/CSS/JS have the true open standard good side instead of anticompetitive proprietary grip. But let's not fool ourselves, those languages are terrible and backwards. Same with HTTP. Also HTML5 still falls short of many missing features on the web. I'm hoping for a new generation of a better set of languages to take over. But this feels like hoping for x86 to go obsolete, even Intel couldn't kill it.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well. I hope that someday the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a true bytecode VM-in-browser.
    - pornel 15y ago
      We had true bytecode in the browser already, it was called Java. VM isn't necessarily going to make things better. JS execution speed increased by orders of magnitude (it's getting close to decoding H.264 in real time!) It's more likely that ES6 and future versions will make JS more palatable and easier to optimize. Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as the raw JS.
      - nitrogen 15y ago
        Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as the raw JS. What I'd like to see is a layer of abstraction somewhere between canvas/SVG and the DOM: you have mostly-rectangular objects, with Swing- and Qt-style layout managers used to specify their positions. The container object's CSS specifies the layout used to arrange its children. It would need to be possible to write custom layout managers in JavaScript. Then you could write a layout manager that evenly spaces its items around a circle (or any other arbitrary path), for example.
JonoW 15y ago
Damn, we're getting ever closer to Atwoods law! "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-programming.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-...
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  I don't know what Silverlight does under the covers, but the event handling language in Flash is Actionscript, which is a dialect of Javascript. So in that sense we're already there.
  - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
    Silverlight is just C# (or theoretically any CLR language) with XAML layouts and a specialized set of libraries.
dos1 15y ago
Good riddance! I spent the last 5 months at a gig working on a massive Silverlight 4 application. I've been a web guy forever, but I took this job thinking it would be good to learn how the other half lives. After experiencing the pain and drudgery of working with Silverlight, I couldn't be happier that it's going away. The most maddening part of working on a Silverlight app was that things that are dead simple with HTML/JS/CSS are tons of work with SL. I was always amazed at the gymnastics required to get even simple UI functionality to work. Xaml itself was a problem. Why in god's name to we need another superset of XML? Especially with all that atrocious binding syntax. And also, every time you want to see a UI change you have to build the XAP. When you have tons of Xaml is takes forever to compile to see a minor change!
- jonpaul 15y ago
  Interesting... I as a Silverlight dev now learning JS/HTML/CSS would say the complete opposite. I find it very difficult to create similar layout functionality like DockPanel and friends. Any tips?
  - dos1 15y ago
    You know it's interesting that you're seeing lots of pain going the other way. I realized part of my issue with Silverlight was just how different it was from what I was used to. I don't like things I don't understand :) That being said, I did like the Stack Panel and the Dock Panel. I liked them because they worked more closely to the way HTML layout works. It was the Grid that I despised. The markup was tough to follow (putting Grid.Row="" and Grid.Column="" for each element inside the grid was stupid) and ultimately positioning in Silverlight was very much about absolute position and fixed dimensions. As far as tips - vertical stack panels are just a series of unfloated divs (or other block element). Horizontal stack panels are a series of floated divs. Vertical positioning with HTML/CSS can be tricky, especially in older browsers. line-height and padding/margin are you friends :)
    - jonpaul 15y ago
      Thanks. I found this a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like it might be useful: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/ Demo: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ I wanted to post this for anyone who stumbles across this info via search.
chadaustin 15y ago
What will Microsoft do for 3D on the web, then? They've said the won't implement WebGL and Silverlight 5 + XNA was supposedly their solution.
- hvs 15y ago
  If I were a betting man, I would guess "build some new proprietary technology", but they may just go back to WebGL now that they are committing to HTML5.
  - 5hoom 15y ago
    I really do hope they decide to go with WebGL. Keeping a fragmented ecosystem with a 'WebDirectX' or some other proprietary new tech will just slow overall progress in this area. For web developers doing 3D it means "This site requires IE/This site doesn't support IE" unless you can support two parallel codebases.
jongraehl 15y ago
At Microsoft you have a bunch of brilliant programmers who are forced to follow "strategic direction" from above. Even if they wanted to, there's no way they can continue working on a mothballed project they still believe in. People who relied on the Silverlight plugin certainly cannot continue to develop it, either. Long-run, there's more security in relying on software created by a sufficiently large and capable community of enthusiasts. Such software will never die if it's good enough to be useful - sunk costs, NIH, and all that. The "strategic direction" of a community won't change except by consensus. People will enter and leave. By the time the community withers and dies, nobody cares any more.
- nobody3141592 15y ago
  I would love to know what Microsoft's strategic direction is. While announcing lots of C++ love for Visual Studio and promises of C++11 compliance they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows The 'official toolkit' is WPF and whatever managed C++ is called today. But with Silverlight dead what future does it's under regarded cousin have? So no problem we all switch to it's new tablet/phone OS. Only they won't tell us which of the windows phone toolkits are going to be on tablets and PCs - if any. Or are we supposed to be developing all our apps for Azure and the cloud now? Or are they just abandoning the PC like HP and we write everything in HTML5 for the browser?
  - pseale 15y ago
    The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the Silverlight API. Silverlight used to be promoted as: * Flex/Flash compete * Public web compete (I never recommended it for such) * line-of-business (not publicly available) apps * (recent) Windows Phone 7 Silverlight is now promoted as: * line-of-business apps * Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet) Metro is now promoted for: * Win8 tablet apps * Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?) * possibly Win Phone 8 apps I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for .NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward. ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks. WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.
sunsu 15y ago
So what does this mean for Windows Phone 7? Will Silverlight eventually go away for it as well? Since the majority of WP7 apps are developed with Silverlight (i think?) what will replace it?
iam 15y ago
They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE, providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other [desktop] browsers. Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still playing catch up to Chrome. At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x faster than any browser out there.
Hominem 15y ago
I have been working on a silverlight app for almost 2 years. We started in silverlight 2 and are now on silverlight 4. There have been a million twists and turns but our business demanded things that simply are not practical from HTML/JS. People within both Microsoft and Google use my app, and I recently heard from our division president that they were "blown away". With this news the mandate came down to prepare to "rewrite in python". How is that for marching orders. Makes no sense but management is so anti-Microsoft at this point they are irrational. As a developer I have sunk years of time and effort into this. I guess I can take my XAML knowledge and build windows 8 LOB apps down the street.

193 points by exDM69 15y ago

Interesting announcements from Adobe and Microsoft, one after another.

I "get" it when it comes to silverlight for public facing websites. Really. I do. The general populace doesn't want to have to install a plugin. But what about intranet apps? Silverlight is so incredibly easy to work with (compared to html/css/js) that there are lots of companies that have built intranet apps with it because they control the end point. I really hope this isn't true.

kstrauser 15y ago
A lot of companies that said the same about ActiveX are still limping along with IE6. I'd rather ask my boss to budget for more development time than to suggest rolling out a single-platform solution in 2011. The takeaway is this: don't build your mission critical internal apps on a Microsoft browser plugin. This has never worked out well.
rbanffy 15y ago
> But what about intranet apps? Remember when IE6 was so incredibly easy to work with? Remember how much effort has been dedicated to port those internal "web applications" that worked on one specific browser?
- WayneDB 15y ago
  You're comparing apples to oranges. IE6 is a browser, Silverlight is a plug-in. Using Silverlight doesn't mean that you can't switch browsers.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    As long as your browser supports the SL plugin.
    - WayneDB 15y ago
      Incorrect. Silverlight runs out of browser.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        Oh... You mean using Silverlight for intranet applications without a browser... That's an interesting idea. Allow me not to take part on it.
        WayneDB 15y ago
        You're allowed. I'm also allowed to not be held hostage by a "standards committee" that never gets anything done.
        nailer 15y ago
        Wouldn't you say HTML is at least partially done?
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        rbanffy 15y ago
        You know you are hostage of a company that may discontinue the technology you depend on any moment they want, right?
        WayneDB 15y ago
        I prefer being hostage to Microsoft rather than Apple, the Gnome team or the KDE team. Outside of building your own OS and your own user interface, you only have slightly more of a degree of freedom with 'nix. At least my master gives me a 'created-date' field on every file. Gosh, that makes sense. I'd have to write my own file-system or use some outdated, unsupported crap to have that on 'nix.
arctangent 15y ago
But why require your developers to learn another set of technologies? Much better IMHO to just have a good web development team who can make internal applications too.
- mweimer 15y ago
  I think most corporations already have people with C#/XAML skills.
  - arctangent 15y ago
    The odds are much higher that they have some in-house web developers.
- WayneDB 15y ago
  Oh, so everybody should just do HTML no matter what, from now on, for ever and ever, amen? Nobody should ever invent a competing technology because HTML is good enough for you? Is that it?
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > Nobody should ever invent a competing technology As long as this technology is easy and free for everyone to implement in compatible ways, yes, you can.
    - hvs 15y ago
      "You can" implies that you have some sort of say in the matter. Why should everyone have to implement technologies that are "easy and free" just because you say so?
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        Good point. You can, but you shouldn't. And I won't use it or encourage its use. In fact, I'll speak against it on every opportunity I have.
sunchild 15y ago
One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers without painting yourself into yet another proprietary corner.
- xradionut 15y ago
  Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    This is exactly the problem. HTML/CSS/JS is disgusting to someone who knows the power of a good native SDK. People who only do web dev just don't know what quality is.
    - joelthelion 15y ago
      Quality is also your stuff running on anyone's computer, and not depending on a big company that has the power to kill your stuff and force you to rewrite it.
      - WayneDB 15y ago
        Sure. That's nice about HTML, but too bad you lose almost every other quality thing because of it. I don't understand why everyone is so hung up on HTML though. The internet is not HTML, the internet is TCP/IP and all the protocols that ride on it like HTTP. Why can't we just leave HTML the way it is, use it primarily for making nice documents and come up with something new for apps? You know, instead of trying to shoe-horn everything into a spec that has to cover both apps and documents or anything in-between? Why isn't there a standards committee for a kit like Silverlight or Flash? The runtime would have to be built once for each platform, but that's no different than HTML.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.
notatoad 15y ago
an intranet is the sign of a lazy IT department. put that stuff up on the internet, let employees access the resources they need wherever they are, from whatever device they are using. every discussion i've ever seen about advancing the state of the web, the sticking point has always been "what about intranet/corporate networks?". well, if you run an intranet, fuck you. stop using the idea that you control the endpoint as an excuse to write crappy apps. you shouldn't be controlling that end point, you should be giving your users freedom to access your services in as many ways as possible rather than limiting their productivity by restricting their usage to your approved endpoints.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Not that simple. There are tons of rules and regulations businesses may have to follow. Some data may never leave company premises. Some data may never leave the room it exists.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    if data can't leave the room and it's on your network, you are in violation of that policy whether you have an intranet or an internet. security policies like those are stupid, and an artifact of a time before networks. we shouldn't have to build our networks around outdated policies, security policy should be built to accommodate the technologies of the time.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      We don't have anything like that here - we don't do top secret stuff - but, in that case, the machine wouldn't be on the network.

jrydberg 15y ago

I wonder what will happen to Microsoft Smooth Streaming if this happens.

ypcxz 15y ago
I wonder why isn't W3C / Google / whoever doing more to bring / standardize proper video streaming support to HTML5. I mean the HTTP progressive download support e.g. in Chrome is almost like streaming, but it's not the same.

bchjam 15y ago

the Mary Jo Foley article this one loosely references is here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverlight-6-and-does-it-matter/11180?tag=mantle_skin;content http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverli...

forgotAgain 15y ago
A tangent but why is "TheVerge" getting so much play on Techmeme's front page if it produces articles like this one?

tcarnell 15y ago

they should have probably made this decision before starting the first release!

joelthelion 15y ago

Good riddance. And once again, all the companies that decided to rely on a proprietary, non standard technology are going to get bitten.

DrJokepu 15y ago
In the meantime, there's no really reliable standard, cross-platform and cross-browser way to play back audio or video in the browser as major browser vendors still cannot agree on a single codec that would work everywhere.
- cryptoz 15y ago
  That magical method of playing audio or video has never existed, though. The elimination of the Silverlight plugin (and mobile Flash!), neither of which were reliable cross platform/cross-browser, should speed up the efforts put in to finding such a perfect solution.
  - elliottkember 15y ago
    Hopefully. Unfortunately, any time anyone talks about cool new innovations in the browser, we have to use the word "hopefully".
WayneDB 15y ago
Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6. Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it. Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?
- forgotAgain 15y ago
  Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written. Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.

nailer 15y ago

Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  That isn't what I've heard (from people still at Microsoft). Everything points to Silverlight and WPF being frozen because the teams are pretty much broken up at this point. Also, this is pretty clear as well: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    The branding might be going away, just like the Zune brand, but the core technologies are already part of the Windows 8 SDK.
    - moonchrome 15y ago
      What core technology - XAML & .NET ? AFAIK WinRT is a rewrite and is not compatible with WPF & Silverlight. Silverlight (cross-platform RIA plugin) seems dead.
      - loarabia 15y ago
        Certainly Win8 and Windows Phone are not binary compatible with WPF and Silverlight but if you wander around the portion of msdn dedicated to Metro apps or to phone development and look at the available types and methods from the core runtime up to the presentation layer you can see that the common overlap is very large and that they probably started from the same place.

hkarthik 15y ago

I'm curious what Netflix has in the works to move off of Silverlight. I remember reading that their biggest problem with HTML5 players was the lack of good DRM options to please the studios.

sjwright 15y ago
Someone needs to explain to the studios about how computers are really great at copying stuff, which means DRM only ever has to be broken once by one person, and it doesn't matter if it's Netflix or Blu-ray or HBO. The only thing Netflix needs to do is make it inconvenient to rip the stream, i.e. more difficult than downloading the same thing as a torrent. Anything more is pointless.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  No, Netflix has to prove that they aren't the point of failure. Which means DRM is a requirement. Content owners demand it.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Why would they want to move off something that works? The plugins will be getting security updates after all.
- lallysingh 15y ago
  .. fixes for OS updates? Comparability with newer drivers?
- nobody3141592 15y ago
  One code stream for obsolete windows a different one for new windows, another for iPhone/OSX, another for Android......
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
Likely what they do on every other platform already; a sandboxed HTML5 "native" app. They could also take the NaCl route like they do for ChromeOS; but I don't think NaCl is available in plugin form yet (not that it matters for Win8; plugins of any kind are verboten in Metro mode)

hello_moto 15y ago

Wonder what will happen to NetFlix for web. Fallback to Flash I'm guessing...

feintruled 15y ago
They already have a HTML5 client, created for the PS3: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-user.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-...
- cpeterso 15y ago
  Are Netflix's streaming videos DRM'd? On a closed system like the PS3, an HTML5 video player might be possible, but how would they protect their video in a HTML5 video player on a desktop computer? DRM'd desktop video seems like a good opportunity for Flash and Silverlight since HTML5 is unlikely to offer might DRM support.
  - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
    Just because your app is HTML5 doesn't mean you have to run it in a browser. Just like on phones, drop a WebView in and you're set. IIRC, Spotify actually uses Chromium in some capacity on their native client.

d4nt 15y ago

Until a year or two ago there was a stalemate as far as "rich web" development technologies goes. Neither flash, Silverlight or HTML5 was the clear winner. I remember people being incredulous that the iPad didn't support Flash, saying that while it might be ok for the iPhone to not support it, nobody would take the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash. In a way, I think it might be the combined weight of the iPhone and iPad that's broken the stalemate in HTML5's favour. Apple sold so many of them, that website makers had to take notice. When Microsoft announced that Windows 8 metro mode (which may well be the only mode available for low power Win8 tablets) would not support Silverlight, I think the game was well and truly up.

eli 15y ago
It doesn't help that Flash was deficient in a variety of ways. I think this was Adobe's fight to lose.
beagle3 15y ago
Stalemate? Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3. I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the time being, though not for long, Flash is still among the royalty). Silverlight had always been a wannabe.
- d4nt 15y ago
  I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice. EDIT: I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.
  - beagle3 15y ago

Hov 15y ago

If I were them, I would re-focus it as a LOB app platform. That's where it really shines. As for WPF, it serves no purpose whatsoever.

platonichvn 15y ago

It's unfortunate but it was inevitable. HTML 5 is definitely the future. Although, the ability to write an app using type-safe, object oriented code that can run on both the client and server was very compelling.

pnathan 15y ago

It's a great day, both Flash and Silverlight are on the road to obsolete. I look forward to our new HTML5 overlord.

alecco 15y ago
Well, now that you mention it... SGML/HTML/XML/CSS/JS have the true open standard good side instead of anticompetitive proprietary grip. But let's not fool ourselves, those languages are terrible and backwards. Same with HTTP. Also HTML5 still falls short of many missing features on the web. I'm hoping for a new generation of a better set of languages to take over. But this feels like hoping for x86 to go obsolete, even Intel couldn't kill it.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well. I hope that someday the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a true bytecode VM-in-browser.
  - pornel 15y ago
    We had true bytecode in the browser already, it was called Java. VM isn't necessarily going to make things better. JS execution speed increased by orders of magnitude (it's getting close to decoding H.264 in real time!) It's more likely that ES6 and future versions will make JS more palatable and easier to optimize. Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as the raw JS.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as the raw JS. What I'd like to see is a layer of abstraction somewhere between canvas/SVG and the DOM: you have mostly-rectangular objects, with Swing- and Qt-style layout managers used to specify their positions. The container object's CSS specifies the layout used to arrange its children. It would need to be possible to write custom layout managers in JavaScript. Then you could write a layout manager that evenly spaces its items around a circle (or any other arbitrary path), for example.

JonoW 15y ago

Damn, we're getting ever closer to Atwoods law! "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-programming.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-...

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
I don't know what Silverlight does under the covers, but the event handling language in Flash is Actionscript, which is a dialect of Javascript. So in that sense we're already there.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Silverlight is just C# (or theoretically any CLR language) with XAML layouts and a specialized set of libraries.

dos1 15y ago

Good riddance! I spent the last 5 months at a gig working on a massive Silverlight 4 application. I've been a web guy forever, but I took this job thinking it would be good to learn how the other half lives. After experiencing the pain and drudgery of working with Silverlight, I couldn't be happier that it's going away. The most maddening part of working on a Silverlight app was that things that are dead simple with HTML/JS/CSS are tons of work with SL. I was always amazed at the gymnastics required to get even simple UI functionality to work. Xaml itself was a problem. Why in god's name to we need another superset of XML? Especially with all that atrocious binding syntax. And also, every time you want to see a UI change you have to build the XAP. When you have tons of Xaml is takes forever to compile to see a minor change!

jonpaul 15y ago
Interesting... I as a Silverlight dev now learning JS/HTML/CSS would say the complete opposite. I find it very difficult to create similar layout functionality like DockPanel and friends. Any tips?
- dos1 15y ago
  You know it's interesting that you're seeing lots of pain going the other way. I realized part of my issue with Silverlight was just how different it was from what I was used to. I don't like things I don't understand :) That being said, I did like the Stack Panel and the Dock Panel. I liked them because they worked more closely to the way HTML layout works. It was the Grid that I despised. The markup was tough to follow (putting Grid.Row="" and Grid.Column="" for each element inside the grid was stupid) and ultimately positioning in Silverlight was very much about absolute position and fixed dimensions. As far as tips - vertical stack panels are just a series of unfloated divs (or other block element). Horizontal stack panels are a series of floated divs. Vertical positioning with HTML/CSS can be tricky, especially in older browsers. line-height and padding/margin are you friends :)
  - jonpaul 15y ago
    Thanks. I found this a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like it might be useful: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/ Demo: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ I wanted to post this for anyone who stumbles across this info via search.

chadaustin 15y ago

What will Microsoft do for 3D on the web, then? They've said the won't implement WebGL and Silverlight 5 + XNA was supposedly their solution.

hvs 15y ago
If I were a betting man, I would guess "build some new proprietary technology", but they may just go back to WebGL now that they are committing to HTML5.
- 5hoom 15y ago
  I really do hope they decide to go with WebGL. Keeping a fragmented ecosystem with a 'WebDirectX' or some other proprietary new tech will just slow overall progress in this area. For web developers doing 3D it means "This site requires IE/This site doesn't support IE" unless you can support two parallel codebases.

jongraehl 15y ago

At Microsoft you have a bunch of brilliant programmers who are forced to follow "strategic direction" from above. Even if they wanted to, there's no way they can continue working on a mothballed project they still believe in. People who relied on the Silverlight plugin certainly cannot continue to develop it, either. Long-run, there's more security in relying on software created by a sufficiently large and capable community of enthusiasts. Such software will never die if it's good enough to be useful - sunk costs, NIH, and all that. The "strategic direction" of a community won't change except by consensus. People will enter and leave. By the time the community withers and dies, nobody cares any more.

nobody3141592 15y ago
I would love to know what Microsoft's strategic direction is. While announcing lots of C++ love for Visual Studio and promises of C++11 compliance they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows The 'official toolkit' is WPF and whatever managed C++ is called today. But with Silverlight dead what future does it's under regarded cousin have? So no problem we all switch to it's new tablet/phone OS. Only they won't tell us which of the windows phone toolkits are going to be on tablets and PCs - if any. Or are we supposed to be developing all our apps for Azure and the cloud now? Or are they just abandoning the PC like HP and we write everything in HTML5 for the browser?
- pseale 15y ago
  The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the Silverlight API. Silverlight used to be promoted as: * Flex/Flash compete * Public web compete (I never recommended it for such) * line-of-business (not publicly available) apps * (recent) Windows Phone 7 Silverlight is now promoted as: * line-of-business apps * Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet) Metro is now promoted for: * Win8 tablet apps * Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?) * possibly Win Phone 8 apps I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for .NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward. ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks. WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.

sunsu 15y ago

So what does this mean for Windows Phone 7? Will Silverlight eventually go away for it as well? Since the majority of WP7 apps are developed with Silverlight (i think?) what will replace it?

iam 15y ago

They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE, providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other [desktop] browsers. Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still playing catch up to Chrome. At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x faster than any browser out there.

Hominem 15y ago

I have been working on a silverlight app for almost 2 years. We started in silverlight 2 and are now on silverlight 4. There have been a million twists and turns but our business demanded things that simply are not practical from HTML/JS. People within both Microsoft and Google use my app, and I recently heard from our division president that they were "blown away". With this news the mandate came down to prepare to "rewrite in python". How is that for marching orders. Makes no sense but management is so anti-Microsoft at this point they are irrational. As a developer I have sunk years of time and effort into this. I guess I can take my XAML knowledge and build windows 8 LOB apps down the street.