"Poor Microsoft. This week, the Redmond, Wash., giant is gearing up for the next big release of its Web browser, a leap from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8. When open-source competitor Mozilla released its last update of Firefox in June, the Web went wild: People downloaded more than 8 million copies in 24 hours. Microsoft's release might not have such a frat party feel. Even as it gears up to release IE 8, the developers behind the Firefox Web browser are experimenting with a new technology that sharpens the threat their browser software poses to Microsoft's most valuable businesses. The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox's ability to deliver complex applications." While many have abandoned Microsoft's browser offerings, Microsoft will be introducing an innovative new type of selective privacy mode called InPrivate with IE8.
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Member since:2007-02-07
Flexbuilder 3 is 249 USD, in case you use it professionally, it's not really expensive.
I'm using the free Educational license.
I believe MS has free educational license for Expression as well. If you buy it, it'll cost you 500 USD though.
Member since:2005-11-02
You call 250USD "not expensive"? Hogwash! Maybe compared to the massively overpriced multi-thousand-dollar dev kits it's not expensive, but allow me to enumerate the price of the competition:
0 USD
I can write JS, use SVG and canvas without paying a dime. Give me any text editor, or in a pinch I'll do it long-hand on a sheet of paper!
Relegating development to something you must be a professional *before* you attempt is somewhere between stupid and suicide. If the average person cannot just "try it out" and see if they can make it work then far, far fewer things get written. If a freelance or part time programmer who is not dedicated to web development can't just whip something up real quick then it wont get used.
Member since:2005-11-09
uh-huh.
The features and vertical integration with current production make Flex and Siliverlight, going forward, more appealing (especially silverlight). The language features that Silverlight will expose to web development will far surpass anything that javascript and google gears can provide.
Javascript will, in a few years, be going out of style for Web application developers.
Member since:2007-01-22
what is appealing is the large number of extensions for firefox. For example, in IE8 there is a new feature called "Activities"? Well, there already is a firefox extension duplicating that feature.
And of course there is adblock. I don't understand how anyone can tolerate using any browser without adblock.
Member since:2007-09-08
Do you really expect all those people using a browser on, say, PDAs, mobile phones or games consoles to ditch their platform of choice and use a PC, just because a website or two uses Silverlight?
Not going to happen.
Silverlight, like Flash, can not possibly be supported as widely as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript already are. An increasing number of web browsers are not based on desktop OSes, so Microsoft really don't have enough pull anymore to push people into using Silverlight.
Besides, you sound like someone who's never really used JavaScript. It's a great language - the only thing that really causes problems is IE's slow and buggy JScript engine.
It's also kind of hard to argue that JavaScript is going to be made irrelevant in favour of Flex and Silverlight when Flex uses ActionScript (a JavaScript variant), and Silverlight is currently uses the browser's JavaScript engine for scripting support.
Member since:2006-03-29
Member since:2006-01-06
Except JavaScript isn't the bottleneck here: the NETWORK is the bottleneck. Which means that improvements in JavaScript, while nice, won't really do much as a percentage of browsing cost.
Member since:
2005-07-12
"The world is moving toward Flex and Silverlight for web application delivery. I don't think MS is really that worried about a super bump in javascripts speed on Firefox."
Not really. If this were the case then the massive amount of Ajax based apps would not exist. Something like TraceMonkey greatly expands the capability of Ajax based apps.
The other thing is, JavaScript is completely free to develop with, with tools for all platforms (free and proprietary) and runs in all browsers.
While you can do Flex and Silverlight development with just the SDKs, that is no small chore. To be truly productive, you need good tools. In both cases, the tools are quite expensive (FlexBuilder and Expression Blend, respectively), and in the case of Silverlight, the tools only run on Windows.
Finally, both Flash and Silverlight are big CPU hogs, and are known to crash browsers.
In other words, Ajax/Javascript based web apps aren't going away any time soon, and stuff like TraceMonkey, and Google Gears, make them all the more compelling.