During his last public speech for Microsoft as Chairman of the company, at TechEd 2008, Bill Gates made some interesting announcements regarding Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2.0. In the meantime, Windows XP made the headline news at CompuTex.Let’s start off with Windows XP. The 7 year old operating system is getting its lifespan extended by two years not only for budget laptops, but also for ULPCs. According to the company, people demand the familiarity of Windows XP on these devices, but cut all the marketing speak out of there, and you realise that Microsoft simply has no choice: Vista doesn’t run on those types of devices – Linux does. Microsoft has to counter Linux not with its flagship operating system, but with the operating system it launched 7 years ago. And that’s too painful a fact to admit without covering it up in marketing speak.
Moving to TechEd, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced that the second beta release of Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft’s Flash competitor, will go live by the end of the week. Microsoft will serve 3000 hours of Olympic content using Silverlight 2.0 beta 2, to prove it is ready for production work.
To top it off, it was announced that the beta release of Internet Explorer 8.0 will actually come sooner than originally planned. Instead of October 2008, it will now make its appearance somewhere in Augut, Gates said. “You’re going to see the beta of this coming out in August of this year – that’s Beta 2.” Jokingly, he added, about the name: “A very creative name that we’ve come up with.”
I wish Microsoft forced Vista on ULPCs. It would’ve been interesting. How many would’ve switched to Linux?
yeah… no.
something at last!!
and interesting!!
With the new, next, last but not least, in a near future…, you will be able, “drums, please”…
you will be able “applauses please”
you will be capable to (i don’t breath!)
surf on the web!! youppy!
I already see the figure of my own world company growing, thousand of hand clapping, my name on all the magazins…
it’s just a dream , back to reality, install firefox stop kidding.
s/has/his/ ?
Ok, so I’ve been moded down by some slaves. What’s wrong with Vista on ULPC? I thought Vista is a capable operating system. Capable of frying the poor ULPCs some might say, but still capable
The reason why you were marked down is because it is a dead horse that is contiously flogged by people here (btw, I didn’t mark you down, I don’t mark anyone down on this site). There is nothing wrong with Vista, simply people doing cheerleading high kicks whilst screaming “Vista sucks” does start to wear a little thin after a while.
As for Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight; given the crap quality of the Flash plugin by Adobe on non-Microsoft platforms (and even on Microsoft platforms), I would have thought that the non-Microsoft OS users would be the first to celebrate. Maybe if Adobe was subject to some competition, they might actually get off their behinds and hire some decent *NIX programmers who know how to programme.
Internet Explorer 8 is going to be interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’ll be like when it is shipped; Firefox 3.0 is a great browser, but I am hesitant right now given the number of unfixed bugs in their nightly builds and in some cases, regressions that are occuring. Opera is doing no better with their refusal to fix log standing compatibility issues between Opera web browser and websites. Simply blaming the websites doesn’t help anyone – the end user will simply look at the browser not doing what it should and conclude that the browser is crap. You either step up fix the compatibility issues or step aside and allow someone else to take the spotlight.
Flash works alright for me on Linux. And the open source implementations like gnash are starting to mature.
Absolutely not. I would much rather have a somewhat inferior official Linux version of the Flash plugin than Moonlight, which isn’t even officially acknowledged by Microsoft, and could be obsoleted or shut down by Microsoft at some point in the future.
Competition is good, but I will complain to any website that uses Silverlight. It’s a big threat to alternate platforms. It’s pretty common sense not to let the dominant OS maker also control a big web media delivery mechanism. Adobe is not great, but at least they have no motivation to lock out competing platforms.
Really? So far I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Firefox 3. But I guess there are lots of system variations. Hopefully your issues get addressed before release.
Edited 2008-06-04 02:57 UTC
You are of course welcome to not use Moonlight, but to say it isn’t officially acknowledged by Microsoft is completely false.
Here is the Microsoft press release on Microsoft’s site about it: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-04Silverligh…
Interesting. That’s the first official mention I’ve seen. Then again, the official silverlight site (http://silverlight.net/) has absolutely no mention of linux anywhere, not even some indication that it could be eventually a supported platform. So for now I wouldn’t put too much stock in that press release.
Edited 2008-06-04 04:54 UTC
That is interesting, considering that press release is almost a year old, coming from Sept 4 2007. I would say that if that’s the first time you’ve heard official mention of Moonlight from MS, then you haven’t been listening.
The “officially acknowledged” bit is off the mark … but the “could be obsoleted or dropped by Microsoft at any time” observation is absolutely spot on.
1. Moonlight = Binary codecs, available only from Microsoft.
2. Microsoft counts Linux as its major threat.
You do the math.
Microsoft could drop the binary codecs used by Moonlight, but Moonlight itself is fully open source code developed and released by the Mono project. Moonlight is also developed to use ffmpeg codecs should you choose not to use the Microsoft binary codecs. (Moonlight does not ship with ffmpeg for obvious legal reasons.)
flash does work semi well for me on linux but compared to flash on other operating systems, it is without a doubt completely terrible.
I agree with the comment above also that non ms users should appreciate anything that isn’t flash cause i sure do.
Opera havea “on-the-fly-fixer” built in.
It’s a set of what technically is “User JS”(or in Firefox jargon: greasemonkey scripts) for the most popular websites that modify them on the fly to make them complaint.
Personally I find Opera’s true, non-compromise approach to web standards very appealing.
Anyhow, it’s been some years since I’ve noticed any problems with sites though. The only site I can think of is my company intranet(and their support for Firefox is bellow decent), and a friend of mine also said that the new beta gmail also have problems.
“The reason why you were marked down is because it is a dead horse that is contiously flogged by people here”
While baseless Vista bashing does get old, I think the OP was bashing Vista less than he was pointing out that it takes more resources than XP, a reality Microsoft themselves acknowledge by “extending the life of XP Home for 2 years for budget laptops“. As such, I don’t think it’s unreasonable of him to state that had they not done so, the higher requirements of Vista (making for a less performant** experience on ULPCs) might have driven a few more people than otherwise to use Linux on such devices.
Some people may object to the way he phrased it, but I’m not sure how one could quibble with the basic point he was making. If they can, I’d rather about hear it than see a comment moderated down with no reason given. Ah the new moderating system
** neologism ahoy!
a more open browser market rather than an IE dictatorship is always going to be good for users and developers.
IE8 passes acid 2 doesn’t it?
“To keep up with the growing popularity of the recent wave of small, low-cost, flash-drive-equipped, wireless “netbook” computers, Ubuntu Linux today announced a specially modified version of the Linux operating designed to run on such machines.”
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleB…
Apparently Microsoft aren’t the only OS provider keen to make an offering for this emerging market segment.
It seems that OS vendors are predicting that ULPCs could become a not-insignificant section of the market.
And why not? Acer has just announced a 9-inch screen ULPC (basically an EEEPC competitior) based on the new Intel Atom processor call the Aspire One, with a significant price advantage over the EEEPC.
Acer are hoping to sell 7 million of these units a year.
The Acer unit uses Linpus Linux Lite, the EEEPC uses Xandros, the MSI Wind uses SuSe, Wallmart’s offerings use gOS … so I wonder which vendors Canonical has in mind for Ubuntu Remix? The Dell Mini Inspiron, perhaps?
I wont’ be using it, but maybe I now finnaly can start coding completely standards-complaint pages without resorting to IE-specific hacks to make it work in IE.
Although I am a bi sceptical to MS’ claim of being focused on crossplattform on Silverlight I think Flash definetely needs some preasure to become better. (And maybe the Moonlight-thing will make Adobe want to support Gnash, or at least make a better *nix version of Flash?)
It’s funny. I never thought I would see the day when people on Linux would prefer a closed environment (flash) over an open one (mooonlight). I know… patent issues… but can anyone site a place where MS has gone after anyone for a software patent? Especially .Net? I am curious about how real this threat really is.
Admittedly, I really like Silverlight. I think it is the best thing to come out of MS in a very long time. And I thank Miguel and team for doing the OSS version. While I know a lot of people have issues with it, the reason he states for doing it is to not be left out, and I believe he is right. The Olympics are a good example. I really doubt that anyone at the networks care if content is viewable on Linux. So, we have the mono folks to thanks for being able to see these videos. And to the point above, MS has invited Miguel to present at several MS events (including keynotes!) and is giving the team the entire Silverlight test suite. Additionally, MS opened up a good chunk of the Silverlight code (such as the controls) under the permissive license so those parts are technically FOSS. Adobe is trying to say that they are being more “open”, but there are still huge chunks that need licensed (RTMP as an example).
So, let’s give MS credit when it does the right thing, and take them to task when they don’t.
Agreed it is nice to see Microsft finally make IE 8 have some standards and support moonlight. Even if they get pressured either way, they are doing the right thing now, so anyone bashing them, well are you ever happy with anything, seriously??
You got it the wrong way around.
Moonlight is not open. There are binary codecs required, available only from Microsoft.
Silverlight itself is certainly not open. There are bits of the API and bits of the specification that are secrets, disclosed on a non-disclosure basis to Novell only.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_(runtime)#Microsoft_support
Flash on the other hand … the specs have been opened, available for anyone to implement, no restrictions … fill your boots.
http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/
http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/developers/
Now that IS open.
Heck … it is even FSF/GNU:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Edited 2008-06-06 14:26 UTC