Silverlight- A New Role to Web Browser

This time it is a new family rather then the upgrade of the existing product. Recently, in NAB conference Microsoft has launched its new web product called Silverlight. According to Microsoft, this product will be competing with Adobe Flash even though they are different in their offering services. The languages supported are PHP, XHTML, Apache C#, JavaScript (ECMA 3.0), VB, .NET, Python and Ruby with Python and Ruby supporting in their respective licensing policies. This product will benefit developers a lot. They can build a normal JavaScript and copy it in Silverlight where it can perform a multiple times faster than what it does in normal web browser. Everybody knows that Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E was in news from quite some time now. Microsoft introduced Silverlight as one of the products of this technology pool. The latest release was 1.0 beta with alpha release of version 1.1 made available as well.

Silverlight is a cross browser, cross platform plug-in to improve your web experience. Designers can design W3C standards web pages. It runs in all popular browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. CNET gathered the information about How big guys on internet Like Netfllix, Major league Base Ball team and Web developer plans to make use of this technology. Silverlight Beta 1.0 is just a 1MB download and it takes less than 1min to get installed on your pc. The universal package contains both Intel and power pc versions. Silverlight will be available in public this summer.

Supporting Platform

Silverlight is supported by all the popular web browsers like Ie6.0, 7, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. The present version is not supported on Opera and on windows 2000 machines, Microsoft is planning to make it available in future versions.


The Future

It looks like Microsoft has joined the race with yahoo! and Google to make heavy bucks. Its for sure that this product is going to fill Bill’s pocket. But speaking frankly, the main aim of Microsoft till now is to provide effective and user friendly services to its customers. This looks to be a new area where Microsoft has entered to render its services, in near future, there are lot of such surprises which we will be getting from this software giant. Tim a microsoft blogger says that there is a big surprise up their collective corporate sleeve which will soon be announced at mix . In his post on techcrunch, Nik Cubrilovic writes that this service may be pushed by Microsoft overnight with their windows updates or with hotmail services, but till now there are not such declarations made by Microsoft.



Useful Links


For more details visit the Silver Community and Silver Site

Developers and Designers If you are a developer, you will find this one interesting.

Silverlight on Wikipedia




Videos

Extend your Browser Programming model with Silver light [By Stefan Schackow: Microsoft]

Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect [Developer Of Lotus Notes: IBM Corporation]