didnt they already come out with a flash competitor a few years ago? i cant even remember the name of it, i guess that means SOMETHING about it ;-)

i havent read more details about it, so i cant say much right now, but im sure it has its strong points, but theyll manage to ruin it somehow, making it not compete with QT/flash

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No thank you. Microsoft has proven over the years its blatant disdain for cross-platform compatibility. They'll give us a Mac version of Silverlight while they try to attain dominance, then once in the driver's seat (if ever), we'd see the Mac version start to slip in functionality, until Microsoft dropped it completely (IE for Mac, Windows Media Player for Mac). Then we'd be right back to "Viewing this site requires Windows IE 7." No thanks.

Fortunately, I think Microsoft's days of being able to bully the Internet are over, or are at least coming to an end. And that's a good thing for everyone.

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Oh lord, anything but .Net

When I used windows I could hardly comprehend how terrible it was. Now, how bad could they possibly make a ported version of it?

Never will this touch my MacBook

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.NET is trash, and Microsoft can't even support the industry standard languages of web development properly, much less introduce a new plugin. Adoption of this will require the open arms of web developers, and none of us are that interested since MS has mistreated us since the introduction of IE6.

Netflix maybe posing interest, but their needs are misguided: they want DRM video, and without iTunes, they're leaning on MS. I say if Netflix keeps leaning this route they're already on a death kneel; I left Blockbuster because of it's restrictions, I have no need to adopt more than I already have to tolerate.

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..and besides, it's XAML - MS's XML that's tied to a platform. Another blow to our community.

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Maybe if they put up a real challenge for Adobe, we'll see better releases of Flash. Flash is a slow POS on the Mac right now, and if some competition from MS would help improve that then I'm all for it.

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If Apple would have allowed all comers to use their DRM,
then we wouldn't have this problem. Many people would love to use
something other than this or Microsoft's current player that isn't
cross platform and could have potentially gone with Quicktime
with DRM like iTunes movies are, but NO, Apple won't let anyone
else use it, so here's what you get. Everyone with a video to sell
can't get on iTunes, only big guys. So if I want to sell my video
for $1.99 with some kind of DRM, you can't use Apple to do it.
It's not the market's fault there is a vacuum that Microsoft and
Adobe (with their new player) are filling, it's Apple's fault for
not filling it themselves.

Dan

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Well after trying to get it to work multiple times, I still can't get the demo movie to play. Oh well, guess it's not worth it. Already cleared all traces of it off my mac.

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In the article it states "TUAW reader Neil points out that this means that at least some of the .NET framework must have now been ported over to the Mac." as if this were not an openly known fact. Actually, almost all of .Net 2.0 (they're already working on 3.0) and specifically the C# programming language have been ported for full cross platform by the Novell/Microsoft open source project Mono: http://www.mono-project.com M$ bashing aside, this is actually starting to be a viable cross-platform development system to rival definitely things like wxPython and Java Swing, or even QT. I would really suggest any interested people try it out. Their mac tools are great - you can get full access to the Cocoa api's and build fully native interfaces in INterface Builder, with the program logic written in C#.

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Now that all the wailing and hand wringing is done, has anyone tried this? I installed it on a Mac OS 10.4 test box and downloaded the samples and can't get a single one to load in either FF or Safari.

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I tried it, and it seems to work well and the picture quality is good...

It is still in beta, and you have to give it a bit of slack...

We should applaud Microsoft for thinking of the Mac and putting resources into it.

http://www.microsoft.com/SILVERLIGHT/

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