Microsoft Launches Silverlight With Full Linux Support
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that Silverlight — its platform for creating and distributing rich internet apps, also called RIAs, in the browser — is ready for its coming out party. After a four-month beta period, version 1.0 of the browser plug-in is now available. It’s totally cross-platform as well, with support for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows and support Safari and Firefox on the Mac.
Microsoft also announced a new partnership with Novell, which has built a Silverlight player for Linux. Novell’s Miguel de Icaza heads up the company’s Moonlight project, which has ported the Silverlight player over to Linux using open-source tools from the Mono project. (Mono lets developers port .NET applications directly to other, non-Windows operating systems). We showed you their demo in June, and the team has been building out Moonlight’s capabilities ever since. Although the player was developed with Novell’s SUSE distribution in mind, Miguel tells us the Moonlight folks are releasing plug-ins and packages so other distributions to incorporate it.
The Silverlight technology is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash, the platform used by the vast majority of RIA developers to create immersive, design-heavy user experiences which incorporate lots of audio and video. The near-ubiquitous Flash is installed on around 95% of desktops and the Flash player is used on all of the web’s leading video-sharing sites (YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe and so on) so Microsoft has quite an undertaking ahead of it if it’s going to compete.
Linux support is one place where Flash has been lagging lately, but how positively will Linux users respond to a browser plug-in developed by Microsoft? Either way, Microsoft’s Brian Goldfarb, product manager for Silverlight, understands the larger picture.
"Microsoft is taking some big bets on Silverlight," he told Wired News.
Goldfarb is quick to point to his platform’s outstanding video support, which surpasses that of Flash. Silverlight was designed to present HD video on the web, and it has playback support for 720p HD content. Eager to show off the platform’s HD firepower, Microsoft has been recruiting content companies for its new Silverlight partner program. Entertainment Tonight is going to use the player to extend its red carpet coverage of the Emmys and other Hollywood awards shows online, and the Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment group (WWE) is going to start hosting Silverlight-powered video on its site.
But probably the best example of Silverlight’s HD capability (or the most interesting, depending on how you feel about ladies in leggings or dudes in tights) is Microsoft’s own Halo 3 site. The company posted trailers for the new game in 720p HD. There’s a screenshot at the top of this post showing the site in Safari on a Mac. Goldfarb says this campaign in particular was a huge hit. Was it the player or the content? Who cares, it looks great.
