Silverlight 3: a true competitor for Flash?

The least you can say is that Microsoft is struggling to interest the market in its Silverlight technology for Internet apps as a competitor to Adobe Flash. To try and gain a foothold for the product, the Redmond based firm have brought out a third version that is supposed to have several qualities to give it the advantage over Flash.

The main innovation is "Smooth streaming". This system allows the speed of an online video to vary in real time to adapt itself to the capacities of the link between the server and client. Another advantage is that you don’t need to put a large portion of the video in a buffer so as to provide against sudden falls in connection speeds, meaning that a video will start playing almost instantaneously.

Silverlight 3 is also putting the accent on HD: the H.264 and AAC codecs are supported (it is also possible to develop other codecs) and you can watch Full HD films. The display can go up to HD 720 p and Silverlight can use the graphics processor for these tasks. This lightens the load for the central processor, often overloaded by large web apps, and takes the ground away from under Adobe who recently announced graphics acceleration for forthcoming versions of Flash.

So then, a platform that allows you to bypass the search engine, like the Adobe AIR: full and autonomous apps and not applets that have to go through Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer, can therefore be developed. The applications that bypass search engines will therefore execute with or without a network connection, moving from one mode to the other automatically – this is the flavour of the month: Google Documents also function in this way.

Microsoft is also emphasizing the usual programmer orientated arguments, such as use of the .NET environment for development of applications in Silverlight, the inclusion of DRM in the flows and an option for developing ads.

There is still a weakness: Silverlight 3 has been announced for "Mac, Windows, and Linux". The Linux version has however been delegated to Novell in the framework of the Mono Moonlight project and doesn’t seem to support the latest developments – you can’t, for example, watch the Smooth streaming example video.

Presentation of Silverlight 3

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