20 ms·
While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it being "
by yason 14y ago
While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it being "shifted" out as a product.
Silverlight was (implicitly?) positioned to compete with Flash and just like Flash, it was mostly an obscure piece of proprietary technology and mostly just a nuisance. What made Flash matter was video streaming and YouTube: suddenly all those who had been avoiding Flash because of stupid games and stupid Flash advertisements had to get Flash to view videos on YouTube. This never happened on Silverlight to a major extent; it always remained a weird alternative to Flash.
Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. They will both churn along for years but their supply of momentum is running out.
What practically killed Flash was the highly excretory nature of the Flash codebase. With the huge installation base induced by video streaming the Flash plugin had great opportunities per se but their codebase barely ran on a fast PC, and mobile Flash never materialized for real. First it was slow and when mobile devices got faster, it was a battery hog. So Flash got stuck in remaining the de facto web video player device and that space is slowly eaten out by various HTML5 based video technologies.
I hope we can ditch first Silverlight and then finally Flash in the shortest order of time.
- throwaway2048 14y agoOff on a bit of a tangent here, but has anyone noticed that Google's efforts to HTML5ize Youtube seem to have totally stalled out for desktop browsers? Progress seems to have stopped after deals were announced with adobe over android flash. It also seems virtually certain Google has the source code the the flashplayer, as it came out relatively quickly for Chrome's PAPI (adobe moves like a snail when it comes to supporting new apis, especially ones where older apis continue to function), and chrome flashplayer appears to receive patches before even the "official" flashplayer releases do. I wonder if that doesn't somehow factor into the seemingly arbitrary flash requirements on youtube.
- pjmlp 14y ago> Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. Game developers beg to differ