A bit of a shameless plug, the company I am contracting for at the moment put this video/map tour of the World Cup stadia together.

http://www.theworldcupmap.com/

(requires Silverlight, a fast machine and a decent network connection)

Silverlight. Proprietary. Too bad.

I'm not sure why something with heavy requirements needs to be on the web. Just make it a stand-alone application if it has such dependencies. Everyone seems to be in round two of being crazy for the web.

I'd actually like to see the results, but I'm not going to install Silverlight either.

EDIT: Here's my litmus test. If it doesn't work on multiple (different) browsers on different OSes without installing additional support plugins or programs, it shouldn't be a "web app."

Uhhh... yeah. What he said.

tanstaafl.

Really.

Flash wasn't proprietary enough for your employer/contractee?

One of our clients is Microsoft, so no

True and I suspect that moonlight isn't up to running it on Linux yet, as I don't think they've caught up with the latest version of Silverlight yet.

Yeah, I was getting ready to post that there is an open source implementation that has the one minor problem of not working. Oh, and the larger one of crashing Firefox while it's busy not working.

I can't say I'm the greatest fan of Silverlight either, especially as a committed iPhone user. What the "app" is doing isn't quite possible/practical with HTML cross browser just yet. As such Silverlight lets us do things that we can't pull off cross-browser without it.

Of course taking your stance firmly you'd have to put up with a web without video, until the last few months at least

Many of our clients, not just Microsoft, are keen on Silverlight and some times you have to give the client what they ask for to make a living. For the record we do plenty of cross browser work that doesn't involve either Flash or Silverlight.

It wouldn't make sense to do it as a stand-alone app (even though that would be easy to do still using Silverlight), given that the whole point was for Microsoft to show off what Silverlight could do in the browser...

That doesn't sound promising. As it is the demo requires Silverlight 3.0 and the released version of moonlight only implements 2.0

Well, technically speaking, videos are content, not apps and they can be downloaded and played offline. Multiple browsers on multiple platforms have also had their own support for playing video within the browser for 10+ years. But I do understand where you're coming from. Even today with new video tags you're still going to want a nice Javascript player to properly enjoy embedded video.



Actually, you should probably always give the client what they ask for, or don't take them on as clients. It's understood that this is more a showpiece for the technology rather than a general WC resource. And using Flash probably wouldn't help Microsoft at all...

There are a lot of proprietary web-based tools that should just be implemented as stand-alone applications, which can still be built using the resources of the specific browser they're intended to run on. Lots of intranet stuff for instance. A lot of stuff that would do far better not to be encumbered with the generic browser controls that can mess up their usage anyway.

Quite. I spent 8 years working on complex Intranet apps that not only targeted just IE, but also typically targeted a single version of IE.

That sounds horrible at first, but it did mean we got to write lots of rich AJAXy Intranet web apps before AJAX as a concept even existed, because we got to use XML, XSLT and XMLHTTP for years before they arrived in the other browsers.

That situation isn't going to change over time, either, as it is the whole point of Microsoft "helping" with Silverlight on Linux: Keep it one version out of date.

-ml

I'm not sure I agree with that, at least in the bits of Microsoft that actually write/design things like Silverlight. Those teams seem to be packed full of people who are keen to help get moonlight as up to date as quickly as they can. Short of actually releasing a version of Silverlight for Linux themselves I'm not sure what more they could do.

As as we know if they released Silverlight for Linux themselves no one would want to use it...

Thats the problem with Microsoft. So big and unfocused, it's hard to know what their intent is. Take for example IE 9. It's awesome that they are finally seeing the value of standards, and I'm sure some of the engineers on that team get it. And then marketing gets involved with a page like this, and their good old "must crush competition by digging up FUD" spirit is right there again.

Oh, and I did take a look at it on my work Windows machine. Sadly it seems a combination of the following hardware, software, and connection wasn't good enough:

Windows 7 64 bit
Quad Core Xeon 5450 running at 3GHz (7.3 Windows Experience score)
4.0GB RAM
IE 8
Silverlight 4
45mbit internet connection
1680x1050 resolution

It looked cool, but the video was chugging from time to time and the sound was hiccuping quite a bit. It was a little better when I tried it full screen.

It is a good job Apple didn't recently get up to anything like that recently, like releasing a load of HTML5 demos that sniffed for the user agent to stop other HTML5 capable browsers from running them

But yeah, I'd never attempt to defend Microsoft's marketing people. I never forgave them for tacking .Net on the name of all their server products that had nothing to do with .Net, just so everything looked pretty. Idiots.

When I first looked at that page, like you I thought "good old FUD". However when looking back again, I'm not sure it is quite that simple.

If we assume for a moment that those test cases aren't just lies and they really do test tricky bits of those standards then that set of pages, complete with interactive test cases, is actually quite a useful thing for the browser community.

Of course the fact that IE9 passes all the tests makes it look very bad. I suspect how it happened is:

- MSFT looked at IE9 to see how well it fared against the standards
- they found some places were it didn't match the standards
- they wrote a bunch of test cases to highlight the places where IE9 failed
- they then fixed a bunch of the cases
- they then released just the tests for the cases that they had fixed

If only they had also released the test cases that they no doubt have that IE9 (and probably some/all of the other browsers) doesn't yet pass.

I'm curious, do Google and Apple make their test suites (or parts of them) public ?

4? Moonlight still doesn't have a final for 3. (I assume the version numbers are equivalent.)

Also, it appears that when that page was first published IE9 did not pass 100% of the test cases, I really do believe that that page is an honest effort from the IE test team to highlight parts of the standards that are ambiguous or tricky to get right. I don't think it is the FUD that it at first appears to be.

For the record my main browsers are Chrome and mobile Safari, I only use IE when I need to test that something works properly in it.

I updated video drivers (for a Nvidia Quadro 3800) and did a clean reboot. Second time around worked better, though the framerate on the video would dip still from time to time. Watching Task Manager, there were moments CPU usage was close to 90%, usually when the map was zooming in or out. I'm guessing my video drivers might have been out of date enough to not accelerate Silverlight 4 causing it to hit the limits of the CPU.


Yeah, stopping other browsers from even trying was a bit odd. The main difference though is Apple isn't calling out other browsers with those demos, trying to paint them in a negative light. They just talk about Safari (on the desktop and on the iProducts).


Agreed. At least they backed off on releasing Windows .Net Server, and renamed it to 2003 before release.


Most of the info for Safari (and the underlying WebKit) is public, at either webkit.org, or developer.apple.com/safari. They are even quite candid on the WebKit blog at times, showing Webkit failing tests while in development. I remember them showing progress on Acid 3 regularly until it hit 100/100(something IE 9 still fails horribly). I'm not certain about Google or Mozilla though, but I assume they are also similarly open with both the good and bad. I'll have to dig up specific test cases, I know they are out there somewhere, but can't find them in a quick search before calling it a day at work.

I know Google released a JavaScript compliance test — Sputnik — and Chromium fails almost as much of it as Firefox, though it does so much faster.

I installed Silverlight in Firefox I must be crazy !!!! In Firefox it was really slow and the videos wouldn't start playing. I tried it in IE8 and it ran much better. In both cases the fan in the computer kicked into high

Is that the thing about football? No thanks, I think I'll pass....

Ironically the Silverlight app actually has GPU acceleration turned off at the moment as we found it was causing issues in some browsers on some machines.

Uh...go USA! Beat those English chaps.

/me ducks and runs

You mean, like Adobe has done with flash and acroreader, or VMware has done with their products, or WordPerfect did, etc.. ?? All closed-source binaries that I'm happy to use here on Linux?


We have no idea what would happen then, since they've never done that for any MS product, and never will.

They may be incredibly dumb and/or criminal at MS, but they're not stupid. For them, it's all about DOS/Windows as The platform. So porting _any_ app to Linux would be suicidal in their teensy minds.

I think the Microsoft Dev team is a lot more forward thinking these than many give them credit for. A lot has changed about MS development tools in the last 10 years.

The whole thing about "it shouldn't be a web page- it should be standalone"- well that's true in a lot of cases- but often it's difficult to get the decision makers to see this. At least the new XAML technologies allow you to esentially build it either way using the same tools and let the client decide how to deliver it. We are currently building a HUGE line of business Silverlight app and we may end up setting it to run out of browser, so it won't even really be much of a web app in the end. Honestly we probably would have been better off doing it as a client app, but they were dead set on a web app.

Microsoft has seemed to be on a long road to decline because they think they're a Windows company and not a software company. Slowly but surely they're going to have to change this mentality or they will eventually lose.