Does anyone use Microsoft Silverlight?

[daneoni]

MS just invited me to watch the 2008 CES Keynote and i thought why not, its Gates's last speech as CEO afterall. However MS then asks me to install Silverlight before proceeding.

Anyone know what this is and if there are any benefits of having it installed?

 

[Eraserhead]

Its MS's new flash "killer", its just like an iPod "killer" in that regard.

The benefits of installing it are that you can watch the speech 😛.

 

[daneoni]

As a flash killer will it actually play flash content like Youtube and play it better than Adobe's current offering orits just another MS bloatware

 

[TheStu]

As a flash killer will it actually play flash content like Youtube and play it better than Adobe's current offering orits just another MS bloatware

As it stands right now, i have no idea if it will play Flash. However, it uses about the same, maybe less CPU than Flash (at least on OS X) but can do better things apparently. Like higher quality video at the same bit rate from what I hear. Based on my personal experiences, when it comes to media compression, Microsoft is usually pretty good.

 

[Eraserhead]

As a flash killer will it actually play flash content like Youtube and play it better than Adobe's current offering

No, it doesn't play actual flash content, it is similar though, its like Microsoft Office against OpenOffice.

 

[Komiksulo]

I downloaded it after getting a "would you likie to try this?" screen on MS's website. I've never seen it anywhere else than the Microsoft site.

 

[CaptainHaddock]

Don't install Silverlight. You'll only encourage them. (Microsoft)

 

[Consultant]

Do not install it.

Probably will be of inferior quality than real flash. Why? they tried to do the same thing with WMA, which is documented to be of lower or close to quality of mp3, except with DRM.

 

[TBi]

Do not install it.

Probably will be of inferior quality than real flash. Why? they tried to do the same thing with WMA, which is documented to be of lower or close to quality of mp3, except with DRM.

[Citation Needed]

For one WMA doesn't always have DRM, you can turn it off, and secondly the quality is on par or better than MP3's.

WMA

As for silverlight, it doesn't play flash so on MS website you either get plain old website or the upgraded silverlight version.

 

[Mushrooshi]

I don't like silverlight.

They haven't gotten any plans to make it Mac avaliable for the software to make stuffs.

 

[neonblue2]

No dev tools, constant browser crashing, and just plain not working has kept me away from it. What's gonna suck is when Microsoft includes Silverlight in a Windows update and i becomes a standard for 90% of the world.

 

[Eidorian]

I have the plug-in installed. There's a little less overhead using it for movies then Flash's current state on OS X.

 

[minordv8]

MS just invited me to watch the 2008 CES Keynote and i thought why not, its Gates's last speech as CEO afterall. However MS then asks me to install Silverlight before proceeding.

Anyone know what this is and if there are any benefits of having it installed?

So I just installed this because it's required to play movies from my Netflix account. So far I haven't seen any major problems. It'll do until I'm ready to spend the $$ to upgrade my Tivo box to work with Netflix, which wont be for awhile.

 

[sananda]

just found the other day that silverlight 2 doesn't work on ppc macs, so no more watching catch up itv.