Microsoft releases Silverlight 1.0

We've blogged about Silverlight on TUAW before, and now Silverlight 1.0 is available. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's juggernaut, Flash. This cross platform browser plugin (it works with Firefox and Safari on the Mac) was built from the ground up with RIA's (that's Rich Internet Applications, or fancy webpages in non-geek speak) in mind. Silverlight can also stream high resolution video (up to 720p), and promises to offer the same experience on both Macs and PCs.

Keep in mind that this is a Microsoft product, so in order to create Silverlight apps you have to code in .Net, but I'm more interested in using Silverlight apps (Netflix, I'm looking at you).

Silverlight is free, and works with OS X 10.4.8 and above.

Silverlight is set to auto-update, so if you want to turn that off keep reading.
Once you have installed Silverlight (instructions here) navigate to a page with some Silverlight content embedded in it (i just went to the Silverlight homepage). Right click on a Silverlight area, and a menu will pop up:

Clicking on that menu will bring up the Silverlight Configuration screen:

There you can set Silverlight not to auto check for updates, though Microsoft warns against it.

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Source: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/installation-mac.aspx

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We've blogged about Silverlight on TUAW before, and now Silverlight 1.0 is available. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's...

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uros

Although it doesn't stand a chance against Flash, Silverlight isn't that bad, IMO. But, I'd say that I "like" it only if they make some "Silverlight Maker" for Mac.

September 05 2007 at 10:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Baff

Microsoft has stated that with version 1.1 (due out early 2008) they will be dropping support for PowerPC Macs (2 years old), and adding support for an 8 year old Windows OS.

September 05 2007 at 7:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Scott Beachler

Tried it... and it busted all of M$ links on their own Sliverlight website (in Safari and Firefox). Nice work M$.

September 05 2007 at 12:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Patterson

Whoops! Heres a link to the image I tried to embed above:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1296/1330339845_40d13d002c_o.gif

September 05 2007 at 11:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Patterson

I went ahead and installed the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in and the first thing I saw when I went back to the Silverlight home page was this:

Same thing occurs in Safari. Oh yeah, that's a real Flash-killer, all right...

September 05 2007 at 11:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

two-shots

is it just me, or does the Silverlight logo look like a blue ethereal G-String?

September 05 2007 at 10:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dale

I'm torn. As a web developer, the amount of extra effort Microsoft proprietary technologies causes me when building sites is mind-blowing (particularly having to use CSS hacks and branching my JavaScript for JScript weirdness). That being said, our servers are all IIS and we use VB flavour .Net, and it's a really nice language to work with.

September 05 2007 at 10:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

basscadet

hope it dies a silent death

September 05 2007 at 10:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

?!?

Why do they bother? What's the compulsion? Are they so insecure that they can't stand the idea that there exists, somewhere, a market unsullied by their gut-wrenchingly tasteless touch?

Jesus fucking Christ, I wouldn't even give a shit about Microsoft--let them bathe in their own shit if they want, I mean, what's it to me?--but they just *have* to go around spreading the filth to the rest of the world. Fucking sociopaths.

And of course you're "interested in using Silverlight apps." Of course you've blogged about it before. We'd expect no less of you, TUAW staff, you latent PC users you. Love!

September 05 2007 at 10:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Shaaun

I'm going to reserve judgement until I see what they do with .NET. Silverlight was built on the .NET framework and works on OSX (there's even a Linux version coming) so who knows? Maybe Visual Studio will become a cross-platform dev tool.

Anyways, in case anyone is interested, Silverlight also works with Camino on PPC Macs.

September 05 2007 at 10:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply