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.
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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pisey
May 12th, 2009 7:27 pmIf you are a serious web design or web developer, you won’t want to use a young technology like Silverlight (it is even a new kid in the block) which you can’t find resources, helps, and the other developers easily. It is OK if you just wanna try or play around with Silverlight, but I don’t recommend you to use to build a site for your customers. Since many developers are anti-MS, you will find it difficult. Some devs don’t even wanna hear MS’s product name.
So Flash is 100% a winner.
Bart Czernicki
May 12th, 2009 7:30 pmDo yourself a favor and search for a job that requires Silverlight and one that requires Flash. For Silverlight positions you will see: WCF, WPF, C#, ASP.NET etc. For Flash you see Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, CSS etc. My point? If you are earning a living as a designer you need Flash. If you are earning a living as a developer…learn Silverlight.
Bart Czernicki
May 12th, 2009 7:39 pmJust wanted to state one more thing…
For all the very misinformed people saying “Flash rules and MS sucks”. Where is Adobe’s cloud platform? Where is Adobe’s web server and streaming services? Where is Adobe’s Office Suite product? Where is Adobe’s Map SDK? Where is Adobe’s collaborative solution like SharePoint? most importantly where is Adobe’s Mobile OS?…don’t exist right?
Adobe is a much smaller company and when Microsoft starts throwing Silverlight into everything, Silverlight will be the RIA for business apps. Adobe is completely at the mercy of other platforms supporting it. iPhone with Flash?….ah that’s right. Microsoft has the luxury to throw Silverlight across its vertical and horizontal products and popularize Silverlight in a huge way.
Check out riastats.com Silverlight was at 19% in February 2009 and is at 27% in May. Its going to be at 50% by the end of the year. So, Flash fanboys use the “market penetration” arguement for another few months, because you won’t be able to in a few months.
Vinimay Kaul
May 12th, 2009 9:40 pmVery nice, unbiased article. I have seen some user comments going against MS, but, it seems MS has made a good effort with Silverlight. Though, it is highly unlikely that Silverlight would replace Flash at this point, or even capture 50% share.
gingerman
May 13th, 2009 12:21 amI don’t want to use Silverlight for a number of reasons, but I do wonder if the garbage collection is any better than Flash plug 9 & 10.
Pampado
May 13th, 2009 1:43 amJust as we love the fact that there is competition in the browser market then one should also embrace competition in the multimedia platform market. It appears competition is only entertained by some when MS are the dominent player. I applaud MS for daring to challenge Adobe where no one else would have and they are putting up a good fight of it
Tim Acheson
May 13th, 2009 2:00 amgingerman: “I do wonder if the garbage collection is any better than Flash plug 9 & 10.”
Yes, if you’re familiar with GC in ActionScript 3, I think you’ll love working with C# and the .NET framework. In Silverlight or any .NET application, your code (e.g. written in the C# programming language, or the VB.NET programming language, or Pythin, etc) is compiled for extremely fast and efficient execution, and garbage collection is handled by the common language runtime. You’ll find similar garbage collection with the Java programming language.
In contrast, with Flash, you’re limited to ActionScript which is is a scripting language. Garbage collection in ActionScript 3 is less useful, less effective, and less easy to use than proper programming languages like C# in .NEt or or Java in J2EE. Moreover, Flash has various potentially serious performance issues which often lead to serious performance issues, unless the developer has mastered GC in AS3 because there is such a high dependency on the developer having the knowledge, skills and desire to make manual efforts to stop Flash wasting resources. As other commentators have observed:
“…new functionalities introduced into Actionscript 3 can lead to memory leaks.”
http://blog.comtaste.com/2008/04/garbage_collector_in_flash_pla.html
cyb
May 13th, 2009 2:08 amSilverlight? What Silverlight? Silverlight is unheard of in this country and people won’t download and install something they have not heard of. 25% , probably in the US, but in the world,0000.1% is more like it. Most web designers are on a Mac, Silverlight is not a good choice considering MS’ crappy support for its competitors.
Yes, Silverlight has improved by leaps and bounds—-but all the improvements are mere imitation of what Flash has already achieved. Silverlight to improve it’s penetration rate? Not likely, especially in a country where it’s unheard of and most likely be met with raised eyebrows and treated with disdain much like a computer virus.
Tim Acheson
May 13th, 2009 2:39 amcyb: “Most web designers are on a Mac”
Many designers use Macs. One of the problems with Flash and ActionScript 3 is that the best designers don’t necessarily make the best programmers. That’s why Silverlight allows proper separation of design and programming, so that designers can do what they do best while programmers can do what they do best.
Flash is nice, but it’s enjoyed a monopoly for too long, and Adobe have been resting too comfortably on their laurels. That’s why as early as version 2, Silverlight has been able to offer something better. Give it a proper try, and you’ll understand. That’s also why we’ve ended up in a situation where so many of the rich client applications that we encounter on the web are implemented running ActionScript code written by expert designers, not by expert coders.
Flash CS3 and the development environment offered by Adobe very far short short of the IDEs that professional programmers with expertise in languages like Java and C# take for granted and indeed depend upon for ensuring teh quality of their code and user interfaces. If you want quality code and superior applications, at the very least you require a proper IDE in which to develop, debug, and manage your applications. Adobe doesn’t even come close to doing that. Their offering is lame compared to any proper IDE, though designers who only know Flash may not yet appreciate this.
Many development teams, especially those which take QA and user experience very seriously, have had enough of this; they welcome competition and welcome new technology and new working practices that can solve problems such as ads or media players which look great but can cause things to crash or run slowly or interfere with other applications on the same page, etc.
Mike Naman
May 13th, 2009 3:25 amI can not begin to comment on the inaccuracies and one sidedness of this article.
“The Flash deployment package contains only a single Shockwave (SWF) file, and all images, text and animations are incorporated in this file.”
No Flash Developer worth his salt would incorporate all the applications assets into one file, they are loaded seperatly, can be multiple swfs, jpg, gif, png, flv, xml etc.
“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.”
Never herd of AIR? From browser to desktop in one click. You should try it.
Shame on you Smashing Magazine for putting out such a really poor quality article. Will not be returning…
MSuks
May 13th, 2009 7:27 amo com’ on guys, ms monopolizes, he should focus developing in OS. adobe owns creative design tools
ruma
May 13th, 2009 7:31 amSilverlight better for animation ????
C’mon, it’s a joke !! The author probably never use Flash nor Silverlight…
rwinzenburg
May 13th, 2009 8:08 amFirst off, I’m a big fan of flash and flex. I’ve been working in flash since 1999. That being said, despite their claims, flash and flex are incredibly inconsistent in term of accessibility. Adobe falsely claims that these products are accessible, the testing I’ve seen refutes these claims. Adobe does a disservice making these claims to users of their products. The ADA is suing large companies who do not meet section 508 compliance and using flash/flex puts these clients at risk. I haven’t tested silverlight, but this could be a major advantage for using silverlight on government and enterprise level sites.
Ike
May 13th, 2009 8:22 amSilverlight better..jaja!
Selvam
May 13th, 2009 11:02 amgreat comparison
Leon
May 13th, 2009 12:01 pm@Ian Smith: “So stop talking like Silverlight 3’s features are currently available.”
There’s a distinct difference between not being available (vaporware) and being readily available with some caveats. Right now, Silverlight 3 is as available as Windows 7.
That said, most of the innacuracies of this article were addressed in Silverlight 2, so it’s a moot point. The author plagiarized the hell out a forum post that was factually innacurate, plain and simple. Five minutes of fact-checking should have caught this, and would have if SM had an editor worth their salt.
Stephen Buckley
May 13th, 2009 12:41 pmAs someone who spends most of my working life building RIA’s in both Flash and Flex and Desktop applications in AIR I have my gripes with Flash Development. If you want a good development tool for programming large projects use FDT or Flashdevelop to do your coding the IDE Actionscript editor is a little dated to say the least.
More and more corporations are turning to Flex for Line of Business applications, since some areas of Flex and Lifecycle data services can more efficent for large scale applications since you can send binary objects without the overhead of serialisation.
There is however one major objection to the wholesale uptake of Silverlight in large areas of digital media industry and that is the issue of Designer – Developer workflow.
By and large in Digital agencies this workflow is well understood, practised and honed by success under deadline pressure. No studio manager in his right mind is going to put his job at risk by introducing a technology that upsets that workflow, to only be able to hit 20% of his target market. If you think you can get designers to abandon Photoshop and the rest of the creative suite applications, you have not worked with many of them.
In its full blown form Actionscript 3 is as rich and fully featured as C#, the AIR framework contains a HTML Display component based on Webkit and the new Text component library will allow you to build a DTP application or a Word type application see buzzword as an example. In the hands of a truly skilled developer, the programming tasks, the class framework and the quality of the end result and the knowledge and skill required are comparable to building a desktop application using .NET.
A long way from the simple scripting of Actionscript 1. The only limit is on our imagination as programmers and UX designers.
There is much to be admired at Microsoft and Bill Gates original vision, but they have lost the plot in too many key areas of what they used to do well, and the lawyers and the marketing suits have been pushing the agenda for far too long. It is noticeable that key Accounts in the UK are switching away from video apps using Microsoft technology to the Flash platform. In short my guess is that Adobe will have the upper hand for about the next 3 years while Silverlight struggles to gain market share.
I hope I am wrong since competition creates innovation and I am learning Silverlight 3 currently, simply so I have a grasp on the strengths and weaknesses of the technology. (I need something to challenge “the little gray cells”) I have to admit that the early examples of Silverlight I saw lacked design finesse and looked like they were built by programmers from the darkest days of DHTML ;0)
By and large the technology is irrelevant good programmers can implement their vision in any language, I am very often astounded by the passion of programmers in both camps and the quality of what is envisioned and produced, long may it remain so.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 1:45 pm> Flash uses the frame-based animation model
> Silverlight … is time-based instead of frame-based …
> No need to deal with matrices like with Flash.
Flash animations can be frame-based or time-based. You can pin a script on a particular frame or a particular moment in time.
> The original [Flash] video codec, Sorenson’s proprietary
> H.263 implementation
That is the Flash codec from 2006 and has been irrelevant since Google started moving YouTube from H.263 to H.264 in 2005. Since 2007, the Flash codec has been ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. Flash even supports the iTunes metadata, which is not yet standardized, so you can, for example, open an audio stream with FlashPlayer and display the album artwork and artist info from within the audio stream.
As for how you encode your video, you use whatever ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC encoder you prefer. Both Final Cut and AVID include these encoders, as does QuickTime Pro, which is only US$29. One thing you’ll have to do is make sure the metadata atoms are at the top of the file, not at the end, because some tools still put it at the end and that means the file won’t stream. There is a free AIR tool that swaps the metadata atoms on a batch of files.
> Silverlight implements the industry-standard
> VC-1 codec for video
Which industry are you talking about? Certainly not audio video producers, certainly not the movie and music industries. The industry standard codec in music and movies is ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC (iTunes, iPod, iPhone, Blu-Ray, HDTV, Adobe Flash, QuickTime, camcorders of all kinds, media players from hundreds of manufacturers, digital projection systems of all kinds), and this has been true since just after the turn of the 21st century, when MPEG-4 replaced MPEG-2/MP3 which replaced MPEG-1 which takes us back to the early 1990′s.
VC-1 is a Microsoft codec that was “standardized” by SMPTE (who have nothing to do with consumer video formats, only with editing tools) so it could be used in the now-defunct HD-DVD. NOBODY uses this codec except Microsoft. The entertainment industry did not adopt VC-1 for anything, and has never adopted a Microsoft codec. In the first place, most music and movie editing workstations do not run Windows, and that is where the VC-1 encoder runs. In the second place, we won’t adopt a codec that has a content tax, and that is all Microsoft offers (they want a vig on each file that is shipped, with MPEG-4 there is no vig, you retain full ownership of your content.)
One of Microsoft PR’s favorite phrases is “industry-standard”. When you ask them what industry, they literally will tell you “the PC industry” and when you ask what makes it the standard in the PC industry they will literally tell you “because we use it.” The author of this article got owned here: “industry-standard VC-1 codec” is 100% propaganda. It is not important what video codec is the standard in the PC industry … what matters is what movie makers and music artists are making and shipping: MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. It is almost impossible to find a Windows PC that does not support MPEG-4 H.264/AAC playback through either Adobe Flash 9+ (included with Windows) or Apple QuickTime (installed on the vast majority of Windows PC’s by the end user.) Further, on mobiles the audio video decoder is an MPEG-4 chip (aka 3GPP) … if you want your video to play on phones you have to use MPEG-4.
> Just about everyone already has Windows Movie Maker
Not people who make movies.
> Flash supports …
Your list only includes FlashPlayer 10. Over 90% of the Flash movies on the Internet today will play in Flash 8 or 9 also, which are supported on Windows 98 and Mac OS 9.
> Silverlight … Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (PowerPC),
> Mac OS 10.1/10.5 (Intel)
The above should probably be corrected to Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, unless Silverlight is running on the version of Mac OS X that was current from August 2001 through March 2002 or so.
> Because Linux and Solaris support [for Silverlight] is missing,
> users of those operating systems won’t be able to experience
> Silverlight on their machines.
This goes double for 2 billion mobile phone users. Although there is no FlashPlayer for mobiles yet (do not be confused by FlashLite that is very different), at least Flash and mobiles use the same audio video (MPEG-4) and there is demand for Flash. On the other hand, the latest mobile version of IE uses the IE 4 engine from 1998 (even though it is called IE 6), so I’m not optimistic about any cutting-edge Silverlight support on mobiles any time soon.
> 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.
That is absurd. QuickTime Streaming Server is not only free, it’s open source. You can run it on a number of Unix systems as well as Windows, so it is easy to install on whatever Web server you’re using. There are also hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies from whom you can lease QuickTime streaming if you don’t want to do it yourself.
Further, you don’t have to use a streaming server to stream audio video in Flash. For many projects, it’s enough to simply load the audio or video over HTTP. For example: YouTube! So the streaming cost is $0 in that case.
Honestly, one must do a little research on AUDIO VIDEO when one wants to talk about audio video. It’s not enough to read a Microsoft press release. Microsoft does not have this expertise.
> Flash stores fonts using shape definitions and the player
> doesn’t understand TTF, hence we cannot separate the text
> layer from the movie.
I’m not sure what you mean by not being able to separate the text layer from the movie, but I can’t come up with a way that this might be correct. You can load your font glyphs from a Flash class or SWF at runtime, and you can load your text from XML (or other data source) at runtime. There is even a GUI (non coding) way to convert a TrueType or OpenType font into an ActionScript3 class so you can instantiate it whenever you like during playback.
> The Flash deployment package contains only a single
> Shockwave (SWF) file, and all images, text and animations
> are incorporated in this file.
No, this is not true. Although you can in theory make a SWF this way, most SWF’s load external media and other components. If a SWF plays sound or video, it is in fact very unlikely that the sound or video is contained within the SWF, even if you go back many years in Flash development. It’s common to load XML, CSS, PNG, JPEG, MP3, H.263, H.264, AAC, as well as other SWF’s at runtime.
> A Flash movie can be compiled into a Windows application
> and run as a standalone EXE file
You can also generate an identical Mac application at the same time by checking one additional box.
> Conclusion
I don’t see how anyone with any knowledge of audio video or online multimedia could come up with the conclusion that Silverlight is better for audio video than Flash. I don’t see why Text is marked as better in Silverlight. I don’t see why Silverlight would win in any of these categories. There are simply no reasons here in this article to support these conclusions.
The main thing with Silverlight is that it is well over 10 years behind Flash in development and maturity. Not just within the developer, where Adobe/Macromedia have decades of experience in creative tools, online publishing, multimedia, and Microsoft does office systems, but also in the developer community. With Flash you have a huge community that goes back 12 years and includes hundreds of thousands of developers, designers, as well as audio video people. You can find books on Flash that are specific to publishing video, or specific to 3D, or specific to physics-based animation, or specific to design projects or whatever you are doing. There are dozens of free Podcasts that teach you all aspects of Flash development.
There really is no comparison here. It’s a joke to see so much clearly false data all in one article.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 2:36 pm> Textual content created with Silverlight is searchable
> and indexable by search engines as it is not compiled,
> but represented as text (XAML).
Although SWF’s are compiled, there is no reason to store any content inside a SWF. The text for all of the Flash movies I made in the last 5 years was in XML, either in flat files or chunks of XML from a database. In fact you can store your Flash content in an RSS news feed, which is designed for indexing content and which Google ranks very highly, and which can be read outside of Flash by many browsers and even non-browsers.
Another thing you can do with Flash is load an external HTML file at runtime and style it with CSS. Therefore, you can use a typical HTML+CSS website as your content store. Obviously, this is well-indexed by Google. When I think about how Google weights a full HTML+CSS website with RSS feed and SWF’s in there compared to a Silverlight app with XAML text. LOL x 10000000! You will get way more juice from RSS than from anything else.
Further, even if you for some reason compile your content into the SWF, the HTML that the Flash IDE generates to show the SWF will have the text content in it, ready to be indexed. Even further, both Google and Yahoo are indexing compiled SWF’s, so there is really no downside to using Flash when it comes to SEO, and no advantage to Silverlight.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 2:53 pm> I’ve played WAV files even point-to-point in VB6–that was
> about four versions ago from VB.NET 2008. Sorry, I can’t
> imagine that what is said about Silverlight playing audio
> is close to correct.
When we say “audio” today in an Internet context we are talking about network-optimized audio, which has been “perceptually encoded” such that it sounds 90% the same but is only 10% of the file size. Perceptual encoding is what made audio practical on the Internet. It’s the secret sauce in MP3 and MP4.
A WAV file is just plain PCM audio, like you find on a CD track. It doesn’t even have data compression like a Zip file, where you send 50 1′s as “50×1″ instead of “11111111111 … etc.” Completely unsuitable for publishing music and audio on the Internet, especially when there is an existing ISO standard for AAC and the AAC toolchain is mature and widely deployed.
So supporting WAV in Silverlight does not make it a consumer audio playback platform by any stretch.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 3:35 pm> With this non Microsoft Tools, I served a Web Page that
> rederized the final app to the user using SILVERLIGHT.
> And as if this weren’t enough, the user were browsing with
> Firefox… so.. all of you uninformed flash workers,,, can
> do such a thing in flash???
Yes.
You can load HTML and CSS into Flash at runtime, as well as easily get the results of PHP scripts. You can load data from any SQL source, you can in fact clone an entire website using only that website’s data (however it’s stored) in such a way that the website author can’t tell it is not the original website. I know this because I do this all the time for my own websites, which run as HTML 5 in all browsers except IE, where they run as Flash 9. The users do not know the difference. You can hold up an iPhone (HTML 5 but no Flash) next to IE 5.5/6/7/8 (Flash, but no HTML 5) showing the same URL from one of my sites and it is the same. Same content, same layout, same behaviors, same media, same animations, same dynamic compositing, same custom fonts. Flash has been piggybacking on Web content for over a decade and is very good at it. We don’t even optimize the content for Flash … the Flash layer has to use whatever it finds on the server in the HTML 5 version.
Not sure why you’d want to turn a LAMP app into something only 25% of PC users can view. If you are not also serving an HTML version then you are ignoring 90% of your potential audience.
> But Silverlight uses XAML for all its representations. XAML
> is XML based and opened. So anyone could construct open
> tools for making the work easier and cheaper. Is there this
> possibility with flash???
Yes.
In the first place, Flash has had XML support for a long time. You can load in any XML, including RSS feeds (most of the XML on the Internet) at runtime, and you access the data programatically using E4X, which is the ECMA standard way of accessing XML with JavaScript. You can also load data from HTML, text, binary files, whatever you want, at runtime. Of course Google can index all this content because RSS is the most indexable content there is.
Secondly, the Flash IDE is not the only Flash development tool. In fact, it’s not even the only Flash development tool from Adobe. If you want to make SWF on the cheap there are many ways. There is even a PHP library that makes Flash.
However the Flash IDE is priced about the same as Microsoft’s IDE, so in either case you can pay a little money to get more utility or speed or features. My first Flash IDE was Flash 2 (1997), and now I’m running 9 (2008), and the total cost for licensing 11 years of Flash IDE was less than US$1500. That’s not only coding tools but also a full bitmap and vector graphics editor, video and audio encoders, QuickTime import, Photoshop import. You can make $1500 on one commercial Flash project, the market for that has existed for years and years.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 3:51 pm> although i prefer Flash (especially at the moment) it amazes me
> that some people (morons imo) saying “i choose flash cause
> i don’t like MS” :/ and yet they probably using microsoft products,
> either windows, office etc. i’m not a big fan of MS but this MS
> bashing by some apple fanatics is just ridiculous
I’m a Web developer. What possible use would I have for a Microsoft product? I don’t use any of them. They are office tools … typewriter replacements. They use all the wrong formats, even the text encodings are not standardized. You have to constantly translate from Windows to the Web, even the pathnames. They are 10 years behind Apple or Google.
Microsoft has by far the worst reputation among all software developers. They deserve to be excluded from your toolkit based solely on their reputation. However, when you compare the actual tools you see that Microsoft deserves to be shunned for technical reasons also.
The worst thing right now are the people like you who continue to act like a Windows PC is the same thing as a Mac or a Unix box. It truly is not. When I bought a new Mac recently, it took me about a half hour to install BBEdit, configure Apache2 for virtual hosts, turn on PHP5 and other favorites, copy my entire website portfolio into the Apache DocumentRoot, a little HOSTS work, and I had dozens of sites up-and-running locally, ready to edit or deploy. During the next half hour I installed 2 DAW’s (digital audio workstation) and connected a single FireWire cable from Mac to MOTU pro audio interface and was ready to do world class multichannel music and audio.
But you’re right … I should have just got a Windows box like everybody else, then I would have had the pleasure of discovering anti-virus software and bizarre Microsoft formats that don’t work outside of PC hobbyist space.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 4:23 pm> I mean really…is microsoft really hitler?
Yes, duh.
Not sure why you think they aren’t?
A key is to understand what the word “anti-competitive” actually means. Microsoft has been convicted of anti-competitive behavior but people take it to mean “ultra-competitive” (better than average competitiveness) but it actually means “refuses to compete.”
An ultra-competitive figure skater practices 12 hour days for months before the competition, she involves dance coaches and musicians, yoga instructors, whatever advice and training and innovations she can muster to make her performance that much better, to make her performance even more competitive than it would be otherwise.
An anti-competitive figure skater pays a friend to put on a ski mask and hit the ultra-competitive figure skater in the knees with a pipe the day before the competition. There was a skater called Tonya Harding in the U.S. who did this about 10 years ago.
Microsoft has never outskated anybody, not ever. They’ve knocked hundreds of competitors in the knee with a pipe, though. That is what they’re famous for. The most recent example is the ECMA standardization of JavaScript: Microsoft declared they would never support packages and namespaces in IE, so that was removed from the standard. Why packages and namespaces? Adobe already uses those in Flash and has for a couple of years now.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 4:41 pm> What cracks me up reading these comments is how people look at
> Silverlights current 25% market share as a deal breaker.. so I
> guess if a low market share is a reason to disregard a technology
> then I guess Silverlight not supporting Linux is just fine.
Linux already has a _STANDARDIZED_ Web browser that can view online content. I make the same website for Linux as I do for Mac, Windows, iPhone, etc. no matter what market share Linux has, whether it’s 1% or 10% or 99%.
With Silverlight, Microsoft is asking me to generate WMV and other strange formats so I can show (wow!) audio and video to people in the Microsoft format instead of ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. I can write code in strange Microsoft languages instead of ECMA standard, I can use Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8, and I can be at the mercy of Microsoft’s ADD business plans. It’s a lot of work to get less features than Flash and a smaller potential audience.
Recently, I got out an old CD-ROM of Flash work I did in 1997 using Flash 2 and I tried to view that content in Safari 4 with FlashPlayer 9 on a Mac. Some of the HTML didn’t render correctly due to the font tag and other non-CSS being deprecated (CSS came along in 1998), but the Flash 2 movies played great! The Microsoft formats from 1997 are all long gone. AVI and WMA were EOL’d because of court actions (both are copies of competitor’s technologies, specifically QuickTime and MP3.)
So building on Macromedia/Adobe technologies has worked out for me much better than building on Microsoft.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 4:53 pm> VC-1 is a very real standard.
It is standardized by SMPTE, who have nothing to do with consumer video format standardization.
The ISO standard for audio and video is MPEG-4, and has been since 2001. It’s also the de facto standard, because it’s used by iTunes+iPod, which has over 90% of the commercial music and movie download market, and represents about 90% of the post-CD music players in the world. You will also find ISO MPEG-4 in Blu-Ray, set-top boxes, camcorders, cameras, mobiles, and Adobe Flash.
> A significant percentage of blu-ray releases use VC-1 as the
> codec for the feature films.
> Ever heard of a little company called Warner Bros., or
> Universal Pictures? They use VC-1 almost exclusively for
> their blu-ray releases.
No, VC-1 is from HD-DVD. At one point there was a movement to make hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players and so VC-1 was important to that. However, HD-DVD is long gone and so is VC-1.
Even talking about Blu-Ray as if it is important is a stretch. Apple sells more iPhones _per month_ than all the Blu-Ray players in the world. That’s just iPhones, and just one month. When you add in iPod touch, iPod nano, and iPod shuffle and the other 8 years of iPod then it gets truly grim for Blu-Ray. And I didn’t even count the 75% of all Mac/Windows PC’s that currently run iTunes.
ISO MPEG-4 is audio video. PERIOD. It replaced MPEG-2/MP3 and MPEG-1 in exactly the same roles, which goes back to 1993 or something. Microsoft has zero influence in the music and movie industries. They have nothing there but their own bad rep from the PC business.
Hamranhansenhansen
May 13th, 2009 5:11 pm> SEO, not a problem. Dynamic text, yeah still a problem
> [in Flash]
The key is to store your content in RSS or HTML or other Google-readable format and then load into FlashPlayer at runtime. There is no need to hide content inside an SWF or ActionScript file, or any Flash-specific file.
If you just put your content on the Web FIRST, then it is available to both FlashPlayer and Googlebot from there.
Sixpackistan
May 13th, 2009 6:12 pmThey both suck.
Dormadilar
May 14th, 2009 12:20 amFLEX vs Silverlight
Linky
May 14th, 2009 2:25 amSadly an article based more on google based research than hands on experence. That just makes the author look stupid.
Half is talking about SL1 (a proof of concept release) the rest shows a limited knoledge of SL2 (the real first release) and then completely ignores discussing future developments, for either product. (Kind of vital for any real world project planning.)
betacat
May 14th, 2009 12:04 pm@217: “technology is irrelevant good programmers can implement their vision in any language”
While generally true, the efficiency of a programmer is strongly correlated with the technology used. Some are either friendlier and/or or better suited to a specific purpose.
John Graham
May 14th, 2009 5:42 pmContrary to what is said above, there is tooling for the Mac for creating SL apps starting from V3.
It’s based on Eclipse.
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/
Mike
May 14th, 2009 6:46 pmHalf said in this article about Silverlight is simply not true. Some of It was true in version 1.0 but 2.0 is out for couple of months and 3.0 Beta is already available for download. So:
——————–
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.
——————–
Silverlight supports BOTH frame-based and time-based animations!
——————–
Silverlight uses XAML for its description language, and it is non-compressed, so the size of a Silverlight component is usually larger.
——————–
This is so ridicules that I’m stunned. XAML is the language that explains how UI is laid out. It is only small part of final Silverlight component… and most of the time it doesn’t influence the size of component all that much (.dlls with compiled code that explain the behavior take way more space)
And once you compile your Silverlight project you get .XAP file (as in Flash you get .swf)… which is basically ZIP with all of your XAML, dlls, etc… meaning that all XAML files will get way smaller.
———————-
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:
———————-
Again, stunned. YOU GET .XAP FILE DAMMIT! The same way you get .swf file when you compile Flash animation. And the same way Flash compiler generates HTML page with code you need to copy paste in your final page to load component, Visual Studio gives you HTML page & Silverlight.js
…
I mean it is pointless to correct all of the mistakes in text as it is obvious that author knows next to nothing about Silverlight. I urge him and all interested in learning how exciting Silverlight is to follow this watch keynote of Mix09 and watch part of Mix09 keynote from 83:20… SL3 stuff starts from there.
roco
May 14th, 2009 10:54 pmThis article is terrible, it plagiarized a 2 year old forum post ( http://silverlight.net/forums/t/3015.aspx ) for a lot of its information on silverlight. It is a ridiculous to see the same wording taken out of a table for a clearly outdated version of silverlight. Unprofessional journalism at its finest.
It REALLY would be nice if the author actually used both of the technologies before trying to compare them, just so, you know, they can actually know what is going on.
This site is clearly very popular and it is disappointing to see material like this posted. Sure some of it has been corrected by now but it doesn’t take away from the fact that this article was posted in its original state.
André Villela
May 15th, 2009 5:23 amPeople tend to ignore some critical points while comparing those competidors. And since most of the data in this article is outdated, I’m only going to add some spice on the subject Flash vs Silverlight.
If you say Flash still mostly a Design tool, and Sivlerlight has millions of .Net developers all over the world, just forgot to mention that Flex can do all or even much of the Visual Studio features, plus delivering to web, desktop or mobile.
I’m a Adobe user for about a decade, have played with VS since Framework 1… still good for programing but when it takes to user experiences, it lacks the expressiviness that makes Flash the intelligent choice. Think about if Youtube rellied on Silverlight… Adobe still making things happens, while Microsoft just follow trends and try to monetize as much as possible.
Just my 2¢
dbmuse
May 15th, 2009 5:18 pmno matter how good or not, I avoid MS whenever I can and when I can’t avoid it, I use it in disgust.
Burak SARICA
May 17th, 2009 1:44 pmPlease man, have you really ever deployed a silverlight app? Do you know what .xap is? :D
This article gives what an anti-MS guy wants. Nothing more.
Cyba
May 17th, 2009 11:20 pmSilverlight – late for 5 years. And it’s still undone. I think they need ~3 years to finish it (even if they call it 3-rd version)
Concentrate on existed .NET technologies and software stability is better for users and developers of MS.
name
May 17th, 2009 11:36 pmArticle is trash.
It just try to show that Silverlight is something like Flash.
In fact, Silverlight has a long long way to go to be as good as Flash.
lol
May 19th, 2009 7:15 amthis crappy article is wrong in so many ways….
first, to the author: get your facts right. you clearly don’t know shit about silverlight and are just whinging about it “OMG SILVERLIGHT ON MY INTARNETS MIGHT KILL FLASH BOO HOO AND I HATE MICRO$$$$OFT LOLOLOOO”
and secondly, i believe all the posters saying this article is plagiarised. any credentials you had as an author / web developer have just been rendered completely redundant by you writing / posting this article. i guess it’s true you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. thanks for showing me that.
i’ve used wpf & silverlight for a long time now writing desktop & web apps, and i can tell you that you’re not only comparing an old obselete version of silverlight to a newish version of flash (w/e cba to research it, like you apparently), you aren’t actually right about most of the things you say.
congratulations! you have just shamed yourself big time!
Mike Riley
May 19th, 2009 10:35 pmI think there will always be the barrier to entry of Flash’s wide adoption, for any competing service, such as silverlight. Maybe I’m biased as a mainly js/css/html guy, but I think that not using any flash or plugins at all is the best way to handle dynamic apps, if only for retaining semantic value.
~MJR
Greg
May 21st, 2009 8:15 amyour mom uses silverlight
Listen Up!
May 21st, 2009 8:23 amDoes it really matter when 99.99% of users hate both technologies so much they block them out with AdBlock, NoScript, and FlashBlock? Unless the website is selling a subscription service like mlb.com, nobody gives a sh!t if a site uses Flash or Silverlight because it just represents another obstacle they’ll need to override to get to the information they came for.
Wake up and smell the future: content is still King.
Tim Layton
May 21st, 2009 7:00 pmWindows Mobile 6.5 will have a lot of new apps, features and technologies that will be included and introduced. Just to name a few: internet explorer mobile, live mesh for mobile, silverlight 2 for mobile, windows media player mobile, windows mobile marketplace,.NET compact framework, .NET mobile, compact framework, and SQL server compact. The Windows Mobile contact list will get a huge visual boost and be more touch-friendly as well, with larger menu items and an updated look. Microsoft has officially confirmed a new web browser for Windows Mobile, Internet Explorer 6. The hottest new features and apps include: My Phone–a backup and recovery service for contacts, photos and other data stored on a mobile device. My Phone will also be available for phones running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1. The new Windows Marketplace for Mobile is a centralized place to buy increasingly popular mobile applications. Windows Mobile 6.5 features a new user interface and “honeycomb”. A customizable start screen with hexagonal tiles for each program that are designed to be easier to use on touch-screen phones. The Windows Mobile start menu can be customized with Internet applications like weather or stock reports, that are automatically updated. The new Windows Mobile 6.5 user interface is designed to be more “finger friendly,” You can also move icons up or down in the new layout. In addition, the new Windows Mobile Home screen will support special widgets, which will give status information like missed calls, new messages, etc. Another new feature of Windows Mobile 6.5 allows people to go directly to waiting voice mail, text messages or other information when unlocking their phones. Microsoft Recite, came out of the company’s research group. It allows people to record voice notes or other audio files on Windows Mobile phones and then search for keywords using their voice. LG is set to launch 50 new Windows Mobile devices over the next 4 years. And to boot you will get widgets in windows mobile 6.5. The widgets will appear to function just as full applications do, and will have their own icons in Windows Mobile menus and access to web content. The widgets will be powered, in part, by the new Mobile Internet Explorer 6, which will give them access to Flash and ActiveX controls. The widgets will also have control of the SK menu bar. According to Microsoft, the widgets can be written with standard web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, AJAX, and JavaScript.
Tuyen Nguyen
May 23rd, 2009 1:33 pmThank you for your article, I find it very useful !
FORREST
May 26th, 2009 10:58 pmhey , you really missed tons of features in flash, as far as i know , you really not know all the real world experience in flash…..and your articles is really far far away from the truth , i think you should rethink about Flash and Silverlight ….
FORREST
May 26th, 2009 11:03 pmFeatures————-Flash———-Silverlight
Animation————better———- bad
Filesize—————better———- bad
Scripting————–better———–bad
Video/Audio———-better———–bad
Sound processing—— better———- bad
Accessibility———–better———-bad
Platform compatibility—-better———-bad
SEO—————— nothing——– bad
Supported image formats –better———-bad
Socket programming——better———-bad
Webcam-support———better———bad
Deployment————-better———bad
Windows-application——better———-bad
Media-streaming———better———bad
Dhananjay Salunke
May 28th, 2009 5:08 amOhhhh… very nice article,
I have experiance with both Silverlight and Flex, as per development point of view I like Silverlight than Flex…
Thanks
Dhananjay
Edward Apostol
May 28th, 2009 1:07 pmThis article does not appear to have its research completed, as indicated by the number of comments on this thread. If the objective was to garner attention, I am supposing that it has completed its objective.
I recently did a presentation in Toronto Canada, on Microsoft Silverlight to the Toronto Adobe Flex User’s Group, and discussed with participants the pros and cons of each.
Both Microsoft and Adobe are going “tit for tat” as it were regarding features for each of their plugins, especially since Microsoft has a strong desire to have a presence in the RIA arena. And the information provided above is far from complete/correct, so I would not trust it as a resource, but use it as a guide to base your own opinions.
Tomorrow I am presenting to the department of the Canadian Government the pros and cons of Flash and Silverlight. I think most will agree that ultimately the decision will be the client’s decision, and a successful professional consultant will offer what’s good and bad in both technologies, and take into consideration the client’s audience, technologies, and existing skills base, among other factors, into account.
ADHDeveloper
May 29th, 2009 1:28 pmThe MS fanboi’s will be MS fanboi’s an the MS Haters generally come out blasting MS without knowing what the heck they are talking about.
Truth is flash is a capable platform which has huge penetration compared to Silverlight. Silverlight is newer and younger, still evolving slowly, but for developers used to .Net / C# / VB.Net etc Silverlight is a GodSend.
Flash has been around for years now, and it has more features..but SIlverlight is catching up. In the end though both are capable platforms and the choice for me boils down to what I am most comfortable with. If you are comfortable with AS3, and adobe technologies, by all means go with flash. If you know .Net then Silverlight might be more your thing.
And don’t worry too much about browser penetration. SIlverlight already has deep enough penetration that its not going to go away. In time most people will have both flash and silverlight plugins installed. Did you know IE 8 comes with SIlverlight pre-installed on it?
So bottom line, use what you are comfortable with. They both rock..and they both provide good features and good support.
Nasser Lubay
June 5th, 2009 1:16 ami been doing some research lately of which is to study better… but i think silverlight is way better than flash especially when silverlight 3 will comes out… but silverlight should be aware of svg, coz i think svg might kill flash and silverlight, but i wonder why MS did not adopt the svg technology instead they made xaml…
i think i’ve read this article in some other website… and i think they posted it first,
anyway it doesn’t matter…
im kinda confuse of what to study, svg is kind a same as silverlight,
so which is better svg 2 , silverlight, or flash?
i think i will study silverlight instead of flash, svg 2 is not implemented yet, i think it will be out with html5, in few years to come…
Cyberthugin4life
June 7th, 2009 8:18 amWhy 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.
Jeff Scherrer
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.
M. Straver
April 4th, 2010 4:08 amObviously, this comment is also biased. For example, the “smooth streaming” as is worth noting, is nothing but a technique similar to the good’ol RealMedia streaming, sacrificing video quality for continuous playback.
Silverlight is lacking in many respects, just like Flash is, but they each have their own specific drawbacks. Overall, neither of the two is suitable for streaming HD video, no matter what is claimed – this is from practical experience. Flash puts a heavier load on the CPU than Silverlight does, which makes Microsoft’s solution better for potentially embedded use, but at the same time, the actual quality of the result is seriously lacking.
J
August 11th, 2010 11:14 amhrmm silverlight smaller?
ok well lets see that first off, you need the dot net framework which is about 30MB+ first off the bat. add that into your silverlight application file size total.
compaired to the shockwave plugin + player.
Drew
September 19th, 2010 7:04 amWhat are you talking about J?
The Silverlight 4 Plugin is ~6mb. You don’t need the full .NET Framework. Maybe you are thinking of XBAP, which is a WPF Browser Application.
Kristjan
October 16th, 2011 3:20 pmHmm… Flash can handle 3d pretty well for quite some time now and there are engines that take use of the hardware acceleration. Check out the Alternativa engine.
vikas
February 2nd, 2010 7:23 amchrome is many time better than irefox
tetrazphere
April 16th, 2010 9:25 amI think your reply may be outdated and based on Silverlight 1.0 or 2.0, but making 3D elements, animations, or just with words or any object in Silverlight is amazingly easy, especially when implementing Expression Design, and ByteArray is possibe with a very short amount of code, threading and video are spectacular in Silverlight, again I think your referring to an older version. Even this article is a little dated, and Silverlight 4.0 is coming out soon, hopefully some of the shortcomings in Silverlight will be handled.
anonymous
April 30th, 2010 8:30 amThere are so many things…
1) First of all c#/vb.net and the MS CLR offer great multi-threaded programming options.
2) Web Services support blows away using sockets for client server communication.
3) ByteArrays? Seriously? Have you even touched .net before? It does a VERY good job at this kind of stuff.
4) There are so many other things… Generics, LINQ, parity with WPF for desktop app development, etc.
Oh and performance… If you have to do ANY computations Silverlight will win hands down. The CLR is very performance optimized compared to flash…
I still use flash a lot just because of the install base, but lets be fair with the comparison….
alish
May 7th, 2011 4:02 pmAll you flashers out there better start reading up silverlight. or u might stop flashing and start blinking in a very short while. and it aint that difficult to get into.
Aidiakapi
February 18th, 2011 7:20 amTo avoid misunderstandings:
Silverlight does support 3D.
Silverlight can be programmed (not scripted, like Flash) in VB.Net and C#.Net, and those both support threading, but also asynchronous models.
ByteArray is also supported in both programming languages (like in C#: byte[], or List, and a lot more different collections).
IE does not boycott Flash, in fact, Flash is just a plugin to IE. Also there’s no reason to do so, if IE would lack the support for Flash even the less technical persons would drop it.
Just because Microsoft made something that could defeat Flash on several points doesn’t make everyone that actually tries it before complaining, a bad person.
Kadir Selçuk
March 23rd, 2011 4:24 amJust an addition to your comment: SL has some engines like Balder (which is not released yet) for 3D. Also SL5 will have native 3D support.
mike
June 8th, 2009 11:26 amVery biased article.
JP
June 9th, 2009 2:38 amNice article. It seems to me that flash is a little light technology. Can be created on flesh such site http://www.windows4all.com?
Joel Wallis
June 10th, 2009 12:28 pmI 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)
ByteFlash
June 13th, 2009 2:26 pmDid 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.
www.Batchass.fr
June 13th, 2009 6:19 pmI 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.
Avikash
June 22nd, 2009 7:52 pmI 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.
M. Straver
April 4th, 2010 4:12 amSimple: licensing issues. Can’t include an Adobe product with a GPL licensed browser. So don’t blame the Open Source community, but blame Adobe.
vikas
March 14th, 2011 10:03 amLatest versions of chrome has flash inbuilt. Chrome (read google) will increasingly do this in the wake or Adobe Vs Apple war.
Rob
July 7th, 2009 5:11 pmI 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.
manit
July 9th, 2009 2:18 pmI’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.
Marcos
November 11th, 2011 7:49 amSorry, thats not true. There is a property called Text, always has been there.
There is also a content property. To develop in silverlight one has to understand what the content property is all about. Using the content property, you can nest controls
snapphanen
July 14th, 2009 6:45 pmGod grief I actually read them all, and now I know.
warnov
July 28th, 2009 6:45 pmHamranhansenhansen:
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.
warnov
July 28th, 2009 7:07 pmI’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.
RealmRPGer
August 7th, 2009 8:22 amComing 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.
Alex
August 8th, 2010 7:47 pmYou’re misinformed about Actionscript. Doing your game and animations with frames is just an option, not a requirement. And it isn’t one that’s typically used by serious actionscript programmers. AS3 is also far more similar to C# and Java than it is to javascript.
I would actually say that Flash is a better platform for games than Silverlight is. The display list heirarchy, event system and object model just really works well for this, as does the integration with their graphic tools. Silverlight is much closer to Flex in terms of how you author applications and what it’s great for creating.
.NET developers interested in making games really should give Flash a chance. Learning AS3 after knowing C# is a breeze, particularly if you’re used to some of the newer features in C#. You’ll miss some things, such as LINQ, but you may find yourself surprised by the effectiveness of some of the solutions it has, such as E4X for dealing with XML. Creating event driven flow is quicker than in most languages (including C# – though I agree the delegate system there is really pretty nice), and in many ways I feel like the language lends itself nicely to encouraging good programming practice by not making it too painful to do. Adobe took a lot of ideas from Java and C# when they remade the language for AS3, and while it’s missing some features that make those languages mature, it IMHO makes up for it by having an API that’s second to none for what it’s meant to do.
One tip for people coming from Visual Studio – I find the combination of the free FlashDevelop IDE and the flex sdk to be far more appealing to work with than FlashBuilder or Flash CS5. It’s nice to be able to create content visually in CS5, but for coding, I find FlashDevelop is far more enjoyable. Free is also good.
joe
August 8th, 2009 12:25 pmGay 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.
Jeff Scherrer
April 22nd, 2010 12:17 pmHey Gay Joe,
What’s with all the gay bashing? You know they say that what people hate about other people the most is what they see in themselves.
And as far as straight people using Flash and gay people using Silverlight, my brother-in-law is gay and uses Flash. He won’t even give Silverlight a try. I myself am straight and use Silverlight. And I gotta say, it’s fun, it’s easy, and there is soooo much Silverlight work out there right now.
Only an idiot/closet gay could be as ignorant as you.
Ed
April 24th, 2010 12:46 amNot sure fag vs straight has anything to do with it. I’ve managed Flash/Actionscript teams and I currently work at Microsoft. Most of the homos I found programmed in Flash since it’s a right-brained application. MS is all sand niggas so it’s left brained. So I guess it’s up to your mind training.
anonymous
April 30th, 2010 8:44 amThat is a totally un-educated thing to say… I never see Mac users program in Silverlight. It just does not happen. What coffee shops do you hang out in?
krishna
June 28th, 2010 3:51 amwhy you are irritating man.its not the discussion of gays and lesbians,its about silverlight and flash.may be you are the _____(fill blank)
LOL
September 10th, 2011 8:13 pmLol you are too funny rolf…
Hugh Isaacs II
August 9th, 2009 3:31 amlol, 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.
dotcolor
August 9th, 2009 11:07 pmA 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
Link Starbureiy
August 14th, 2009 4:16 pmMicrosoft’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. :)
Link Starbureiy
August 14th, 2009 4:20 pmMicrosoft’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. :)
echo7
August 27th, 2009 8:39 amone 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.
echo7
August 27th, 2009 8:44 amBesides, its fun to see the 2 (Adobe & MS) compete like this. very exciting, especially from a developers perspective.
Anand Vedapuri
September 20th, 2009 3:40 pmSimple to understand and Neutral comparison and the features taken to compare were practical.
dilipm
September 30th, 2009 4:39 amMr.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.
chatsalot
October 1st, 2009 6:10 amyou 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.
Sanjay
October 5th, 2009 10:20 amI 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.
M.S. Babaei
October 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=en
Try Googling it!
Adam
October 21st, 2009 5:37 amRemember 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.
P
November 7th, 2009 5:22 am‘Microsoft will make sure Silverlight is only available to Windows systems.’
FAIL
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
wornoutwashburn
October 21st, 2009 5:30 pmAn 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.
Max
October 23rd, 2009 4:26 amMiscrosoft 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.
Domnik
December 8th, 2009 2:54 pmOk, 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.
Rajdeep Rath
December 9th, 2009 11:45 amRead the truth about silverlight performance
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/05/20/silverlight-powers-netflix-windows-media-center.aspx
amidude
October 26th, 2010 10:43 amThey only did that so they could use the Microsoft DRM. Changes are coming.
Rodrigo
December 13th, 2009 8:15 amI 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.
Joe
December 26th, 2009 4:08 pmAuthor 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?
UncleNinja
January 8th, 2010 9:55 amWhat? ActionScript is way better than C[insert random symbol here]!
I agree with Joe, Flash is WAY better than silvercrap!
Astho
January 10th, 2010 9:39 pmI 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.
Schulz
January 11th, 2010 8:35 amI’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.
jack
March 9th, 2010 6:54 amMicrosoft certainly is attempting to leapfrog by studying Adobe’s technologies. There’s also nothing wrong with that. Having said that, I’m no fan of Microsoft nor Adobe. I have a job that depends on developing what the client *needs*, not using what technology i think is “better”.
Also, it does no good for your credibility that you first lump the Japanese and Chinese together and then go on to compare them to the alleged non-innovativeness of Microsoft. The Japanese (and increasingly the Chinese) are highly innovative, and often perhaps in a way that the obviously superior people like you fail to see or refuse to see. In fact, the Japanese are already more innovative than many of the traditionally more innovative Western countries in certain sectors. I have nothing against the West (i’m a westerner), just as you have nothing against Japan/China, but many people get worked up over the suggestion that an Asian country can be more innovative than a Western one. And this relates to my point…
So coming back to the point – Microsoft innovates. Innovation is not some magic thing. Just because you take the leapfrog approach (like Microsoft with Silverlight or what Japan did more than 100 years ago) doesn’t mean innovation isn’t happening. Ideas flow freely, and they are more often than not the basis for new innovation. So you’re arguing that new technology competitors must go back to the stone age and start from there, instead of innovating of top of current technologies? That’s reality.
It’s a good idea to be wary of this kind of arrogance, because when you smugly think your beloved company, technology and even country is so far ahead in innovation that no one else can take over, sooner or later you may very well see them whizzing past you in terms of innovation and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That is all very important in the business point of view. Just advice :-)
Declan Fallon
January 20th, 2010 3:14 pmWhile 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
amidude
October 26th, 2010 10:41 amZignals is using FLASH/ FLEX….they dropped Silverlight like a hot potato.
Anand
February 13th, 2010 4:39 amI think Flash certainly is the better choice right now, but must agree that Silverlight has made great advances in short time.
I just don’t wish it well because it just started to look like flash was gonna be the de facto standard for web animation apps and I was fine bcos I knew flash! now if this bitch becomes popular, I m gonna have to learn another new thing. This just sucks !
Sachin
February 18th, 2010 6:08 pmSilverlight 4 boasts many new features even flash 10 can’t match.
It also supports webcam and microphone.
jack
March 9th, 2010 6:33 amProbably should have compared the Flash Platform Vs. Silverlight
Flash is part of a larger platform consisting of different runtimes, IDEs and SDKs.
Ali Moeen
March 30th, 2010 4:32 pmThis is article is sad.
This shows how media is capable of showing facts upside down.
I am disappointed with smashingmagazine to present such inaccurate information . It is unfortunate that this article gets a high rank on search engines. I think smashingmagazine should be more responsible and not just bring articles from any author. This author obviously is not qualified to write about Silverlight.
I feel bad for people who make decision based on this article.
Anybody with a basic understanding of Silverlight knows that 80% of information here are just wrong!!! Sahme.
eko
April 2nd, 2010 11:20 pmcan anyone explain to me..what is the differences between security for adobe flash and silverlight..??
Ramon
April 16th, 2010 6:00 pmMicrosoft innovates — Come on???
Jack, are you on crack or something ever worse?? –
MS is about paying for advertising while doing a crappy remake of someone else’s software… !
commoz
June 18th, 2010 1:36 am@Ramon
FACT: Flash was not a technology of Adobe but of Macromedia.
Luis Ruiz
April 17th, 2010 12:49 pmI’m keen on silverlight since I would love to develop webs in visual basic (.NET)
Cheers.
Javier Novoa
May 19th, 2010 6:13 pmHi everyone, silverlight 4 is release 2 months ago; please checked out and then compare again…
HTML5 rules
Sam
June 13th, 2010 11:58 amHey folks, I have a Silverlight 1.0 application and am trying to get the JAWS screen reader read out stuff about the content. I’m using Accessibility object and its parameters. I’ve referred to the SL1.0 documentation but nothing seems to work. Did anyone get this to work?
Any help here would be appreciated. Thanks.
swathi
July 27th, 2010 6:55 pmam satisfied with this article.it clearly explained me the differences between flash and silver light.But on seeing the comments am confused again,i think some of the features of silver light aren’t there in flash.However based on his/her requirements the developer can go for choosing either of the technology.
RS
August 11th, 2010 6:53 pmSilverlight is now at 4 beta 2. Should you give a shot again at this comparison, you would be astonished how Flash is behind in almost all sides.
Unless this article was done around Silverlight’s 1.0 version, I’m deeply sorry to see smashingmagazine serving such an inaccurate article.
Summary:
- Design purposes: probably Flash.
- Serious applications: Silverlight without a doubt. (*)
(*): But you still have to consider the lower adoption of Silverlight on the web (about 50%)
amidude
October 26th, 2010 10:36 amThat’s being generous…try less than 3%. FLEX blows Silverlight out of the water and all of the big companies know that.
js
August 12th, 2010 7:37 amI work on both.
Develop in Flash => HELL
Develop in Silverlight => HEAVEN
Frank
October 8th, 2010 4:35 pmI have used Flash and all the other Adobe Programs and don’t really have much interest to learn SilverLight just for the fact that Microsoft doesn’t do creative creation programs (Microsoft Paint is useless). I have never personally used Silverlight’s creation program, it being a Microsoft product makes me feel dirty when my browser pops up that I need it. I know that what ever that it is needed for could have been done in Flash instead.
What about the creative environment of the program? Does Silverlight’s creation program support Vector art? Can you create artwork and animated it to the point that it comes a live like a cartoon? Flash has been a strong place for Designers that want to be creative. Adobe has been the creative program company, Microsoft is the OS company, that alone makes me doubt Microsoft’s usefulness in this area.
If you can’t create art in Silverlight, I think Microsoft should just walk away… I don’t want them wining a war that would take away creativity from us Designers. Flash is more then scripting!!
amidude
October 26th, 2010 10:30 amSilverlight is a waste of time and energy. C’mon…templates for every single item on the artboard?? The presentation layer is so ingrained in the application layer that a company can not smartly brand their application using this worthless tool. Our company reviewed both and found that FLASH/FLEX meets our needs and Silverlight is nothing more than a waste of time.
Our designers can really work apart from the developers to create a true rich internet experience that is branded to company standards and not locked into a long, time-consuming effort to brand a Silverlight app. Blend does not speak well with Silverlight/Visual Studio and many of our efforts were simply dropped because VS thought it knew best.
When you can build a simple template that encompasses all components on the artboard in Silverlight/Blend as fast as you can with FLASH/FLEX we’ll talk…till then I’m staying with applications that encourage the separation of the presentation layer from the application layer.