Submitted by “For reasons that are not immediately clear to me, it seems that a lot of developers who attended Microsoft’s recent PDC event were surprised to hear that the company now sees HTML5 as the way forward for developing rich Internet applications – and not, as they had been expecting, Silverlight. Their surprise surprises me, because past statements by the company had already made this repositioning obvious, though perhaps not explicit.”
After the last few years of the main marketing message being that WPF on the client and Silverlight in the browser are the way of the future, MS is suddenly seriously laid back on the WPF promotion, and did a 180 on silverlight. Nowadays, WPF is if you need to do something seriously powerful or complex, silverlight is the choice for simpler desktop apps and for winPhone, and it turns out that html javascript and css, three things that MS has been trying to abstract away from their devs for close to a decade now, are actually the way of the future for the web.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that decision went down. Wouldn’t be surprised if some people lost their jobs for how dismal silverlight uptake has been on the web.
But it’s only natural that Silverlight be less than successful on the web – did they think that all those XP users would go out and install the .NET and Silverlight frameworks, just to view the negligible amount of content that needed it? Or were they relying on people moving away from XP, to platforms where Silverlight could be assumed?
They spent a lot of money paying key people (like nbc for the olympics) to use it. They were hoping that could drive adoption, and once it had a good install base that more developers would use it.
Translation: They had hoped that Silverlight would replace Flash as a requirement on client machines for users to view rich web content, but now it looks as though not even Flash will be the way of the future for that role but rather HTML5 will be. Silverlight becomes a tremendous waste of development money and bribery money, and all it managed to achieve was a signifcant set-back to their lock-in ambitions for the web.
Karma.
The .NET Framework situation is harder than Silverlight. If someone uses a .NET 4.0 feature on any OS where .NET4 is not a given, then the barrier to entry is suddenly raised substantially, as deploying .NET is often an annoying endeavor.
On the other hand, Silverlight 4 is a 5mb runtime with a 90 second install time, where you dont even need to restart your browser or PC.
Silverlight lack of reach is not as big as an issue as .NET vCurrent.
Silverlight does not require .NET (or rather, it is in itself a self-contained compact variant of .NET). The download size is about 7M IIRC, and it doesn’t require a system or even browser restart.
Ehrm, Silverlight might not be as dead as you’d might think. When you read more recent comments after Microsoft’s PDC (like http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/ or http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/11/01/silverlight-is-dead-lon… ) you will read that Microsoft will be continue developing Silverlight.
That means they will also continue to develop the Windows version of it and not just the Windows Phone version.
Windows Phone 7 is interesting … apparently it runs only IE7 (and a half?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7#Web_browser
http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2010/10/29/the-real-threat-of-windows-…
This means Windows Phone 7 won’t get any HTML5 capability, so the only rich content it might be able to show would be Flash or Silverlight based.
That could go two ways … it either could keep Silverlight alive, or it could inhibit the uptake of Windows Phone 7.
Given that both iPhone and Android will support HTML5 I would think this could be a problem brewing for Windows Phone 7. From that, we could also see a small market only for Silverlight.
Silverlight is the application platform on Windows Phone 7. Nothing to do with the browser.
in fact, this is the point almost every SL dev tries to make. Silverlight is not browser or web technology, it is its own platform.
Silverlight is a portable .NET Framework, and a slimmed down WPF. That’s really it.
HTML5 will come to WP7, and Silverlight will be used as the app platform. The world will keep spinning.