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Flash vs. Silverlight: What Suits Your Needs Best?
With the release of Silverlight 1.0 and its subsequent versions, a debate started among designers and developers regarding choosing between Flash and Silverlight. Silverlight faces difficulties in capturing the market because of the maturity of Flash. However, Silverlight has managed to keep up by including certain features that designers and developers have always wanted to see in Flash, such as search engine optimization. In this article, we will discuss some of the technical differences between Flash and Silverlight to help you choose the technology that best suits your needs.
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Animation
Flash uses the frame-based animation model. In frame-by-frame animation, we create an object for each frame to produce an animation sequence. For example, if you want to move something across the screen in 3 seconds, calculate how many frames 3 seconds will take, then calculate the matrices required for each frame along the way. Keep in mind that the player won’t actually maintain a frame rate unless you embed a blank audio track; otherwise, 3 seconds might turn out to be 2 or 6 or 5.
Silverlight is based on the WPF animation model, which is time-based instead of frame-based, so you define the start and end conditions, and it figures out how to do it. No need to deal with matrices like with Flash. Also, no need to calculate the positions of objects in various frames.
File Size
Flash uses a compressed format, and text and images are embedded in the movie, hence the file size of a Flash component is relatively small.
Silverlight uses XAML for its description language, and it is non-compressed, so the size of a Silverlight component is usually larger.
Scripting
ActionScript is used to program Flash objects. ActionScript is an object-oriented language with a full range of controls for designing user interfaces. And it can be integrated with back-end technologies that use other languages and frameworks, such as PHP, ASP and Ruby On Rails. It comes with a huge, powerful class library for developing online browser-hosted applications and stand-alone desktop applications.
For Silverlight scripting, you can choose from among a number of programming languages such as Visual C#.Net and Visual Basic.Net, including client-side scripting with JavaScript. C# and VB.NET can be used to write managed code that runs on and uses all of the enhancements and capabilities of Microsoft’s .NET framework.
Video And Audio
Flash supports multiple video formats. The latest codec is very high quality, and the bandwidth usage is nice. There is one problem, though: if you create a tool that outputs Flash content, the formats it supports aren’t really used by anyone else. The original video codec, Sorenson’s proprietary H.263 implementation, is a mutant version of H.263. The compression follows the spec fairly closely, but a bunch of features were left out, and you can’t exactly just go find complete specs on how to build your own encoder.
Silverlight implements the industry-standard VC-1 codec for video, and supports WMV and WMA. Just about everyone already has Windows Movie Maker, but if someone doesn’t, it’s not a big deal because Microsoft makes available a free SDK encoder for producing WMA and WMV. So, not only would you be using formats that people would more likely be able to encode themselves, but Microsoft provides your product with SDKs if you want to do the encoding yourself.
Sound Processing
ActionScript offers a set of sound classes that can be used to generate and control sound in a movie. You can add sounds from the library while the movie clip is playing and control those sounds. If you do not specify a target when you create a new sound object, there are methods to control sound for the whole movie.
Silverlight doesn’t have the low-level audio APIs you would need to write an audio application in the browser. It doesn’t even support playback of WAV files because .NET has very little audio playback support.
Accessibility
Flash provides rich accessibility features for those who have hearing and vision problems or who rely on keyboard shortcuts. Providing captions for video solves accessibility challenges for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, but people who are blind or have low vision or other physical disabilities need the video playback controls to be keyboard-accessible and to function properly with assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Users who rely on keyboard access can use a variety of familiar shortcuts to control video. Buttons such as “Play/Pause,” “Stop,” “Rewind,” “Mute” and “Closed Captions” can be tabbed to and activated with the spacebar. Slider controls such as for volume and playhead position controls can be accessed via the arrow keys, and the “Home” and “End” keys can be used to skip directly to the beginning or end of a range. The volume slider also accepts numeric keys to set playback audio levels in one quick step.
Silverlight 3 is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing people with partial vision to use familiar operating system controls to make changes, such as switching to high-contrast color schemes for ease of readability. These features are far fewer than those provided by Flash.
Platform Compatibility
Flash supports Windows Vista/XP/2000, Windows Server 2003/2008, Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (PowerPC), Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (Intel), Linux 5, openSUSE 11, Ubuntu 7.10 or later and Solaris 10.
Silverlight supports only Windows Vista/XP/2000, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Mobile 6, Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (PowerPC) and Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (Intel). Because Linux and Solaris support is missing, users of those operating systems won’t be able to experience Silverlight on their machines.
Text Representation/SEO
Flash stores fonts using shape definitions and the player doesn’t understand TTF, hence we cannot separate the text layer from the movie. Typically the text written on a flash component was not SEO friendly however Adobe has made the modifications to Flash so that it will be indexable, and the search engines have begun to index Flash.
Currently Google is the only search engine that is noticeably reading Flash files. They have worked closely with Adobe to develop the right toolset for the Googlebot in order to read the files for indexing. Yahoo is working on it and MSN is working with their own format, Silverlight, so they probably won’t be developing the toolset necessary to read Flash files.
To read more about how to make Flash SEO friendly, please read the following articles:
In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in XAML and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Text is deployed on web server as separate entity and can be read and accessed separately. Textual content created with Silverlight is searchable and indexable by search engines as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).
Supported Image Formats
Flash supports almost all image formats.
Silverlight supports only PNG and JPEG file formats. Some other file formats are supported by Silverlight but in a limited way. A full list can be found here.
Socket Programming
The XMLSocket object implements client sockets that allow computers running the Flash player to communicate with a server computer identified by an IP address or domain name.
To use the XMLSocket object, the server computer must run a daemon that understands the protocol used by the XMLSocket object. The protocol is as follows:
- XML messages are sent over a full-duplex TCP/IP stream socket connection.
- Each XML message is a complete XML document, terminated by a zero byte.
- An unlimited number of XML messages can be sent and received over a single XMLSocket connection.
Silverlight doesn’t support socket programming. Silverlight supports sockets programming through the System.Net.Sockets namespace. Silverlight supports asynchronously sending data back and forth across a socket over ports ranging from 4502 to 4534. Silverlight supports cross-domain socket communications between a Silverlight application and any server, provided that a special security policy file is in place on the server.
Webcam Support
Flash has webcam and microphone support for live video and audio transmission, and using them is really easy in Flash. It takes only a few lines of ActionScript code to invoke the camera object.
| Camera.get | Returns a default or specified camera object, or null if the camera is not available. |
| Camera.setMode | Sets aspects of the camera capture mode, including height, width and frames per second. |
| Camera.setMotionLevel | Specifies how much motion is required to invoke Camera.onActivity(true) and how much time should elapse without motion before Camera.onActivity(false) is invoked. |
Silverlight doesn’t support webcam or microphone.
Deployment
The Flash deployment package contains only a single Shockwave (SWF) file, and all images, text and animations are incorporated in this file. Because of the compressed nature of a Flash component, its images and text are not indexed by search engines, and thus not searchable.
The deployment process of Silverlight is far more complex; all individual components need to be deployed separately. The following components typically get sent to the client for each Web request of Silverlight:
- XML files,
- DLL files (if necessary),
- Silverlight.js file,
- Any other JavaScript file,
- Resources (images, audio, video).
Read the full documentation on Silverlight deployment.
Windows Application
A Flash movie can be compiled into a Windows application and run as a standalone EXE file. It can also be played on a desktop that has an appropriate Flash player.
Silverlight doesn’t support playing the movie as a Windows application.
Media Streaming
Flash provides no such service to host the content and application with them. Thus, building a video website with Flash is not as cost-effective as building one with Silverlight.
Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easy for developers and designers to deliver rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service allows Web designers and developers to host and stream cross-browser media and interactive applications that run on both Windows and Mac. This service can be combined with Microsoft Expression Studio and other third-party tools to create and develop interactive contents.
Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live is currently in beta testing and offers 10 GB of free hosting for rich-media applications.
Conclusion
Selecting the right technology for rich Internet applications is often critical, and choosing between Flash and Silverlight depends entirely on your requirements. If you expect that some of your users will be on Linux or Solaris, then you should go with Flash. If you want your website to be indexed by search engines, then Silverlight may be better.
Besides, as Doug S. is points out in the comments, it’s worth noticing that a minority of web users actually have a Silverlight plugin installed on their machine, while most users do have Flash-support. The Flash Player 9 and higher support streaming of the H.264 video codec which means anyone with a video program that can output an MP4 can stream to Flash. There are literally hundreds of free apps on Mac, PC and Linux that can do this. It’s also important to mention that the latest version of Flash Player supports 3D rendering while Silverlight does not and that SWF, FLA, FLV, and AS are all open-standard formats, while Silverlight is 100% proprietary.
The following table summarizes the features discussed above. Rather than including arrows to indicate whether each platform has a particular feature, we’ve simply marked “better” to show the areas in which each technology beats out the other.
| Features | Flash | Silverlight |
|---|---|---|
| Animation | better | |
| File size | better | |
| Scripting | better | |
| Video/Audio | better | |
| Sound processing | better | |
| Accessibility | better | |
| Platform compatibility | better | |
| Text representation/SEO | better | |
| Supported image formats | better | |
| Socket programming | better | |
| Webcam support | better | |
| Deployment | better | |
| Windows application | better | |
| Media streaming | better |
Further Resources
The following articles are suggested for further reading:
- An Overview of Silverlight
- Silverlight vs. Flash: An Analysis Report
- Flash vs. Silverlight: Theming and Styling
- Flash vs. Silverlight: Words and Numbers
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(8 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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- 252
January 5th, 2010 8:02 pmThis is definitely a biased article. Many things about Silverlight have been overlooked based on lack of experience.
File size is actually smaller for silverlight if you know how to use the tools Microsoft has provided in their toolkits. As well as all of the files are automatically zipped in to a .xap file by Visual Studio. So there is no need to worry about all of the files it generates. Some of the files listed like Silverlight.js aren’t needed on an ASP.NET server because they are already provided. The Silverlight.js just exists as a helper for sites that don’t necessarily have server-side functionality.
The sound processing is somewhat lacking in Silverlight. Although Microsoft provided a way for your code to process incoming media streams before they arrive to the MediaElement. This is something that is done seemlessly without modifying the existing functionality. One example of this is Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming technology. This is something that this article failed to mention but is definitely worth noting. Expression Encoder will encode videos at multiple bitrates (generally about 8). And as your watching the video, the appropriate bitrate will be selected based on your computer’s processing power as well as download bandwidth. The transitions between bitrates are smooth. There is no jitter. The video just get clear or blurry. And videos always start immediately.
The accessibility features of Silverlight are all the same as flash if not better. Silverlight supports close captions and hotkeys as well. And it seems the author just didn’t know about those features.
Something this article completely left out was Moonlight. It is the Mono Project’s Linux implementation of Silverlight. Mono has some sort of contract with Microsoft to provide the implementation exclusively. And from what I’ve read, they have the Silverlight source code as a reference. So Silverlight is supported on Linux platforms as well. And Microsoft makes this known on their own site.
I’ve found Silverlight handles images very well. As well as another format called “Deep Zoom”. With Deep Zoom your images are split up in to several files, much like the smooth streaming. As more and more information for the image is downloaded, the image becomes more crisp. Silverlight will only download the information necessary to display the image at the rendering size untill you try to zoom in on the image.
Socket programming is very limited, but for security reasons. Still most scenarios can be supported with Silverlight. And time-saving tools exist to really speed up communication scenarios. Silverlight supports WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). This is the same framework that .NET has been using since version 3.0. In addition, Microsoft has provided a new product called RIA Services. Which allows you to do database operations and ui binding without writing any code. Aside from binding your xaml elements, it’s all drag and drop. RIA Services also has full customization for field validation. A really impressive toolkit, completely integrated in to Visual Studio.
Silverlight 4 beta supports webcam and microphone. Sure they’re a little behind. But it’s version 4. What version is Flash at?
I found deployment to be way simpler than the auther makes it out to be. Infact Microsoft provided a complete javascript framework to provide functions I used to spend hours searching the internet trying to find ways to do with flash.
There is no mention of “Out-of-Browser” mode for Silverlight. It basically puts a link to the application directly on your desktop. It runs in it’s own window not contained in any browser window. As well as the entire Silverlight program is an ActiveX COM dll. So you can include it in any application. In addition, writing apps for Silverlight is the scaled down version of writing them for WPF and .NET 3.5. So if you wanted to make a stand-alone exe, you would just create it as that type of project. Code can be cross-referenced from both types of projects.
I haven’t seen true 3D hardware accelerated graphics in either. Infact, what I have seen in flash looks like prerendered alpha video. Unless flash has a poor 3D engine and is rendering those “compressed video blocky” effects. I’m guessing if this is the case, 3D is prerendered in your flash designer. Silverlight does have support for true 3D transformations of 2D objects. Alot can be achieved with this, but still no 3D games. I’m sure some day we’ll see true 3D hardware acceleration from both. But until then, 3D alpha video is the best solution. As any 3D toolkits will be extremely slow.
Microsoft also has a toolkit that allows you to export your 2D XNA games to Silverlight. This means the same framework you use to make games for PC and XBox 360 can now be used to create games for Silverlight as well. Simplified, yes? And with that hanging over their head, I’m sure 3D support is coming soon.
Silverlight 4 beta also has full printing support and full mouse support. It also supports a wide range of new media services including downloadable digital copy DRM and full 1080p HD. - 253February 2nd, 2010 7:23 am
chrome is many time better than irefox
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- 254June 8th, 2009 11:26 am
Very biased article.
- 255June 9th, 2009 2:38 am
Nice article. It seems to me that flash is a little light technology. Can be created on flesh such site http://www.windows4all.com?
- 256June 10th, 2009 12:28 pm
I want to add here, that the most flexble power of Flash is the code based animation. The Flash have various scripting libraries to make animations based on ActionScript. You have the native Tween, the Tweener (caurina), gTween, bTween, TweenLite, TweenMax, and much more. With Flash you have a community on the back giving you support arround the world, and powerfully tools, like Gaia Flash Framework.
The Silverlight should work so much to become a tool better than Flash!
(sorry for weak english) - 257June 13th, 2009 2:26 pm
Did somebody care to mention that Flash has lead of few years over Silverlight. All MS haters at the end are writing S/W supported on MS environments to make living.
Like it or not, a pure OO is much better than kludgy scripting environments. Its matter of time when both technologies will be comparable apples to apples. - 258June 13th, 2009 6:19 pm
I used to love Visual Studio, then I discovered Flex Builder (Flash Builder now), based on Eclipse, which is a great development environment to build SWF files. I been using it for 2 years now, it rocks, and I won’t try to learn Silverlight.
The funny thing is that I found a lot of support from flex developpers on the internet, whereas in ms world, it seems people don’t give information so easily…
Also, the open source flex SDK is free to use, so no need to buy a flash license if you don’t want to. - 259June 22nd, 2009 7:52 pm
I personally know flash. But I have 1 question? why doesn’t famous browsers like firefox have lastest flash player install by default.
My user face difficulty to browse my sites when they don’t have flash installed and its a pain to setup plain html navigation just for them.
- 260July 7th, 2009 5:11 pm
I own Adobe Create Suite 4 Production Premium, Expression Studio 1, and Visual Studio 2005/8. I really like everything about CS4 and Visual Studio. I don’t like Expression Suite because it’s not mature, has poor documentation, and Microsoft keeps nickeling and diming me for upgrades to get the tools that support Silverlight. I like ActionScript 3 and C#. I like Flash, AfterEffects and Premier Pro. I like Media Encoder from both products, but I favor the Adobe Media Encoder because I use it more, and I refuse to upgrade my Expression Studio.
I agree with 18. Phillip above. If you are building a web application, use Flash. If you are building a LOB application or an Intranet application in a Windows environment, use Silverlight.
I have tried to keep an open mind with both products because I really don’t care. It’s up to my clients what development environment I’m going to use. So I can use both, which makes me more productive. I love this stuff, and I don’t care who wins.
- 261July 9th, 2009 2:18 pm
I’ve been develop applications for years and Silver Light is not easy task. There are a lot of bugs that you would expect to work but does not. There are standards in controls that are the same in both web and windows development. When you move to silver light for get it. Someone at MS wanted to redesign the entire wheel. The property Text for a textbox has been changed to Content. Give me a break! MS should have extended the Windows development environment to compile to a Silver Light app.
- 262July 14th, 2009 6:45 pm
God grief I actually read them all, and now I know.
- 263July 28th, 2009 6:45 pm
Hamranhansenhansen:
First of all, you are very blind by your preferences. So blind, that u got to lose don’t know how many hours writing your endless post. Obviously, I didn’t lost so much time reading it because of this:
You said:
“You can load HTML and CSS into Flash at runtime, as well as easily get the results of PHP scripts. ”That is a piece of cake for whatever platform!
But what I meant in my previous post is that actually you can write Silverlight applications using the language you want. Even PHP. I’m not fucking talking about taking PHP data into Silverlight nor FLASH. Im talking about writing the APP using a non propietary language.So having read that, I noticed you don’t even read well, so It wasn’t worth for me reading your entire bible.
- 264July 28th, 2009 7:07 pm
I’ve written lots of technical facts in my previous post for this thread, showing all the Silverlight advantages. Not gonna repeat them…
Just a final words:
Flash! Oh yeah! It have been in the market like… hum… forever? Yeah.. that’s true.
Flash! Yeah… it have 3D! It have a huge animation library. It is all around the world! Great!
But…
How long have been Silverlight around there?
Just a little fraction of the time Flash have.How many features have Silverlight included in this short term? A LOT!
Is now better than flash? Or have all its features? Maybe not…No enemy births as stronger as it could be, my flashers… but keep being afraid, cuz in it is lil infancy SL is stepping hard and the using statistics are grown and grown.
- 265August 7th, 2009 8:22 am
Coming from both an artist and developer background, I definitely see Flash and Silverlight as two sides of a coin: Design versus Development.
Flash is an amazing tool for artists, and if you’re making an animation or simple interface with a lot of (excuse the pun) flash, this is the de facto tool to use.
If, however, you’re creating a web-based game or complex interface, Silverlight is most likely the optimal choice. It is built upon a development environment that is meant for this kind of extensibility.
Coding a game in ActionScript is a pain. It uses the idea of frames, so the game loop can look a little funky. Its object-oriented support is also a bit weaker, due its reliance on Javascript. Being able to code a Silverlight game in C# definitely makes that process easier.
- 266August 8th, 2009 12:25 pm
Gay people will want to use silverlight – microsoft has always been gay and its “campus” is dedicated to homosexual activities and IE was designed to make it easier to hook up with gay folks on the Web.
Straight people have been using flash for years and they are unlikely to move to silverlight. Just consider it another example of the “sanctity of marriage” excuse the repugs use against gay marriage.
- 267August 9th, 2009 3:31 am
lol, the comments on here are crazy.
Just to throw in my two cents, I’m not a fan of Microsoft or anything but from the direction it took, I prefer Silverlight over Flash.
Flash does nothing that HTML5 hasn’t proposed, Silverlight goes on to support other languages and even offline usage.
Plus Flash always seems to tax my computer, and I’m using a 2008 Mac Book Pro.
In the future I don’t see Flash being used much except to include features for outdated browsers (audio, video, etc…), Silverlight I see being used for complete applications that compete with desktop apps.
I won’t say it’s the death of Flash though, there’s nothing to say Adobe can’t just update Flash and add features to ensure it’s significance but right now I’m leaning towards Silverlight.
- 268August 9th, 2009 11:07 pm
A Good Article but I think if You compare Adobe Flex Vs silverlight then it will be better because Adobe Flex and Silverlight are companions and i am sure Adobe Flex will get maximum marks, as a adobe lover i believe Its Always the best as for as graphic and media soft wares are concerned
- 269August 14th, 2009 4:16 pm
Microsoft’s development tools make things SO easy to use. Just look at the Flash vs. Silverlight screenshots used here; it’s a no-brain comparison. Anybody who prefers framerates over the WPS animation model is someone who likes (prefers) arcane mess. AJAX is pretty dang, though. :)
- 270August 14th, 2009 4:20 pm
Microsoft’s development tools make things SO easy to use. Just look at the Flash vs. Silverlight screenshots used here; it’s a no-brain comparison. Anybody who prefers framerates over the WPF animation model is someone who likes (prefers) arcane mess. AJAX is pretty dang, though. :)
- 271August 27th, 2009 8:39 am
one of the previous posters said: “4. SWF, FLA, FLV, and AS are all open-standard formats. Silverlight is 100% proprietary.” How can this be true if you are required to have adobe installed to open/read FLA and FLV files? where as with silverlight all you need is notepad to open the XAML.
- 272August 27th, 2009 8:44 am
Besides, its fun to see the 2 (Adobe & MS) compete like this. very exciting, especially from a developers perspective.
- 273September 20th, 2009 3:40 pm
Simple to understand and Neutral comparison and the features taken to compare were practical.
- 274September 30th, 2009 4:39 am
Mr.Muhammad Usama Alam and ur friend Anand Vedapuri…I am sorry to say tht u have not done enough research. And ur examples of comparision were not at all practical, they were actually lame……!!!!! All I want to say is before reaching to a definitive opinion please do some damn research. I am not a great developer or a microsoft enthusiast but I hate when people blab without proper research.
. I am not a flash hater nor a Silverlight fan, but recently I just started learning Silverlight. So far except for the comment on the frame by frame animation..which u may be right, but for most of the other comments, they are lame and obviously lack research. Pathetic for a technically experienced and a magazine contributor. Sorry for the rant but I couldn’t help my self. Sorry. and a request.. please do research. pleaseeee. For gods sake ur a kind of journalists.
- 275October 1st, 2009 6:10 am
you didn’t mention flash lite. It’s a very good implementation, and huge phone manufacturers like nokia now ship their phones with flash lite already installed.
- 276October 5th, 2009 10:20 am
I am a software developer (I don’t develop on flash or silverlight). I develop on Linux at work and my personal box at home is also Linux. I used to be the windows hater guy few years ago, but I’ve learned to judge things on merit rather than propaganda.
So I watched last night’s football game on nbc.com, which uses silverlight for streaming and let me tell you I am impressed. I did a bad job with cooling my personal desktop at home and whenever I try to watch hulu videos on it, it gets my processor so hot that the computer shuts down automatically. Flash just sucks life out of processors. Silverlight in comparison is way way better. I can watch it without killing my computer. It adjusts the bitrate automatically and does not use much of my processor.
I, as a user, think silverlight is better than flash.
- 277October 19th, 2009 1:21 am
“but show me an ajax site that can have all its dynamic content indexed. Not happening because it’s not possible.”
Of course that is possible!
My website using AJAX and it’s completely indexed on Google: http://www.babaei.net/And I’ve done a complex project (A Website + A Desktop Based CMS) about a year and half ago (A multilingual website) totally based on Ajax and it’s completely indexed by Google!!
http://www.kermanshahchhto.ir/?lang=enTry Googling it!
- 278October 21st, 2009 5:37 am
Remember too that Flash has a high level of support for Mobile devices like phones, PDAs and non-Windows netbooks – which is already turning into a huge market compared to Desktops.
Microsoft will make sure Silverlight is only available to Windows systems.
- 279November 7th, 2009 5:22 am
‘Microsoft will make sure Silverlight is only available to Windows systems.’
FAIL
- 279
- 280October 21st, 2009 5:30 pm
An important distinction between Silverlight and Flash animation should be made. Silverlight allows users to create ‘hand-off animations’ (animations that just define the end state of the animation). This allows users to create an animation that will resolve to the correct end regardless of the state of the app. Flash requires animations start with a keyframe making flash developers resort to code-based animation (tweening) to get the same results. However, a major disadvantage with silverlight is that audio and/or video can not be attached to an animation. This makes syncing animations to sound in Silverlight much more difficult.
- 281October 23rd, 2009 4:26 am
Miscrosoft is paying a lot of blogger these days, when I see articles like this one with so many mistakes I just remove it from the bookmark.
- 282December 8th, 2009 2:54 pm
Ok, a whole part of the article is not trus at this time, with Silverlight 3 (and soon 4), but I still think this article is biased, not intentionaly, but rather by lack of information. The one that is mostly untrue is the fact that the IDE is not free, it is free with Visual Studiio Express.
- 283December 9th, 2009 11:45 am
Read the truth about silverlight performance
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/05/20/silverlight-powers-netflix-windows-media-center.aspx
- 284December 13th, 2009 8:15 am
I think you article is well done, but I disagree about de Animation issue.
I notice you are not an animator.Frame base animation its what makes Flash the most used animation tool for web.
- 285December 26th, 2009 4:08 pm
Author of this article has never done an animation in flash – his explanation on animation is just ROFTL – have you ever heard about for example vector shape tweening – which is part of flash since it’s beginning ~2000, and in CS4 they (adobe) added a motion editor for character animation. Can you animate running elephant in silverlight ? with light vector graphics? With precise control on movement/time curve?
- 286January 8th, 2010 9:55 am
What? ActionScript is way better than C[insert random symbol here]!
I agree with Joe, Flash is WAY better than silvercrap! - 287January 10th, 2010 9:39 pm
I think it depend on what we need, i think flash has good basic animation and graphic vector builder. In rich internet Application it depend on what script we ableto.., and silverlight has advantage for programmer that able with microsoft product.
- 288January 11th, 2010 8:35 am
I’m getting a kick out of these comments. Most of the people are commenting from a low-level developer point of view with little regard to business issues. The battle lines between the Microsoft and non-Microsoft camp is very clear! I’m commenting from a user/business point of view. As a company, we have given Silverlight a try a few times, and (again, from a user/business point of view) is quite underwelming. The couple applications we have developed using Silverlight controls have performance and compatability issues. We redeveloped the applications using Wicket controls (javascript, not even Flash) and the applications are much better.
I am also a user of American Express Concur expense reporting system. It is a key business application that Microsoft uses frequently as an example of Silverlight technology. However, it is very slow, and very browser version dependent. Our users hate it. As a company, we must have a very specific version of IE browser for the application to work. It won’t work with IE6, IE8, or earlier versions of IE7, and definately not with Firefox.
Probably the two largest consumer sites that use Silverlight were the last summer Olympics, and Netflix. I watch Netflix movies on my PS3 and on my Mac – the Silverlight player software is very buggy, freezes, controls disapear, etc. In both these cases, most of the development was funded by Microsoft directly.
Considering all this, the idea behind Silverlight is fresh, good, and promising. However, I would not spend my money developing direct-to-consumer or business applications using Silverlight. If Microsoft wants to pay for the development – maybe. Otherwise, our applications will be developed using Flash/Flex for now. From my viewpoint, I compare Microsoft in many of these development technologies to be similar to the Japanese/Chinese. They are not innovating the concepts – they are far behind other technologies. However, they are taking/copying the established areas and trying to catch-up with innovative twists on the things that are already there. Too bad they didn’t start 10 years ago, they may have something.
- 289January 20th, 2010 3:14 pm
While there are some pure Flash plays in the financial field (Alerts4All springs to mind), there are a couple of Silverlight sites coming up the rails: zignals.com.
Silverlight appears to offer more opportunities for development; but this is a non-techie speaking.
DJF
- 00
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Why are you m$ guys dickriding on microsoft, obviously adobe is better in all aspects, the author forgot to mention several features in Flash that Silverlight does not have like 3D, ByteArray, Threading, & Video. I personally like flash, but since silverlight came out, my flash apps seem to crash in ie everytime, I figure that microsoft did that by design of having a ie update to disable or make flash unworkable in ie, anyways I use Chrome and Firefox which is way better.