Silverlight vs. AJAX vs. Flash
Article from Ajaxian » “Ajax is now an Endangered Species”
Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, is an obvious fan of Silverlight, and has a piece on how Ajax is now an Endangered Species…
…Flash has been around for a long time, yet Ajax became en vogue a couple of years ago. It wasn’t because it could pull off richer effects than Flash. In many ways Flash is superior (storage, access to webcam, graphics, browser quirk issues), but it didn’t have some of the webby features that we love. It is a plugin. Silverlight is a plugin. Silverlight doesn’t have the install base of Flash. It doesn’t run on Linux, and I don’t expect everyone to drop arms to take it up after MIX.
My Remarks:
Remember developers some folks do not have Admin control over their PCs and Installing a plugin is usually a 4 step process (except IE ActiveX) :
- Go to Plugin site.
- Download plugin
- Install plugin
- Restart browser.
And most non-savy users are very paranoid about viruses, phishers, and Trojans and are reluctant to download and install something they never heard of before. If Microsoft can work deals with Mozilla, Opera, and Apple to bundle Silverlight like macromedia did with Flash that would help them. I doubt the other browser makers would, but Microsoft does unfortunately have Internet Explorer with the most market share.
A few questions:
Will Silverlight accessible and easily searchable by bots?
If you need to build web apps to imitate desktop software why not just write desktop software? Most web apps are created to make easy remote access without special software and setup.
Silverlight looks promising but if Microsoft wants it to take off they need developers and users to back it up. Most web developers differ on OSs and tools depending on their likes and/or requirements. The web development community needs a cross-platform IDE or SDK and it needs it to run on Linix/Unix. And the users (web-surfs) should not even notice the technologies we use to created our web sites.
