Four reasons why Silverlight cannot replace Flash

Microsoft is not a respectable and innovative enterprise. However, by virtue of its strong technical background and strong financial strength, it can replicate, imitate, and improve the products of its competitors. The biggest advantage of Flash is its mature and stable technology, and it has a large number of loyal advocates. It is an absolute leader in the field of online animation editing. Silverlight released by Microsoft is a plug-in running across browsers. Like flash, it can display vector graphics, animations, and videos.

In many aspects, Silverlight shows better performance than Flash, such as closer integration with Ajax, easier dynamic generation, more friendly to search engines, and higher integration of development tools. The author lists the reasons why Silverlight cannot replace flash from the following four aspects.

Technical potential

For a professional developer, the development potential of this technology is an important aspect when considering which technology to choose. It includes space for improvement and room for improvement, as well as the economic gains you get after you invest time in this technology.

In a short time, Silverlight will show great potential. Microsoft is a large capital company. The typical Microsoft model is that Microsoft will make a lot of money for Silverlight, making people believe that this is a technology worth learning. I know that many Flash developers have earned considerable profits by developing Silverlight projects, which are directly or indirectly assisted by Redmond. Adobe cannot compete with Microsoft in this respect. Although Adobe has abundant funds, it is far from as rich as Microsoft to buy a small country.

In the long run, the basic knowledge that people have learned from Silverlight development will not flash in the pan. However, if you are really interested in developing cross-platform interactive web, the Silverlight technology will largely lock your success on the same platform (Windows) in the future.

Summary: Flash may not have the development potential like Silverlight, but it is a very well-established and mature technology (98% of the installation basics, of which more than 85% is the Flash Player 9 version ), it will continue to expand its scope of use and grow steadily in the interactive web development field for a long time. At present, Microsoft has invested a lot of money in promoting Silverlight development. However, in the future, if Microsoft no longer throws money on it as it is now, the prospect of Silverlight will be another concern.

Runtime

Most discussions on these two technologies focus on the performance of their virtual machines. Normally, the success of a platform is largely determined by its performance. I don't know much about Silverlight, but according to the existing data, the current 1.0 Beta VM is basically the SVG/Wm interface. It does not support components (aka controls), there is no ready-made language interpreter, and there are not many exciting highlights. These improvements have been made in the newly released alpha version of Silverlight 1.1. However, Adobe is still in the leading position in this regard. It has a mature cross-platform development experience and a deeper understanding of the target market.

The interface size and practicability are also an important factor in the test. Flash Player, including two virtual machines, a large number of functional programs, only 2 MB. The incomplete function of silverlight1.0 beta is 1.2 MB (5.3 Mb on MAC ). The Dynamic Language-running alpha version of Silverlight 1.1 is expanded to 4.2 MB (10.3 MB on Mac). If you want to browse the Web page of managed Silverlight, You have to download this runtime, this is a little too large for mobile phone systems with insufficient storage space. I expect it to be larger in the future. The interface size may not be a big problem a few years ago, but it will still have a great impact on acceptance. On the other hand, Flash Player has been installed on 98% of connected computers, which can be automatically updated and run on Windows, Mac, and Lunix, is the most rapid software product after release (the premise is that the user accepts the new version ).

Summary: If Microsoft continues to improve in these aspects, Silverlight has great potential. Unfortunately, I see that they are slow. Adobe is still leading the market in terms of practicality and penetration.

Development Tools

I have read expression suite and it impressed me a lot. Microsoft has greatly improved it. They learned from Adobe's success and improved its shortcomings. Microsoft has many experiences in developing practical development tools, which can be seen in their expression tools. In this regard, Adobe does not have much experience in creating development tools. Microsoft is updating the expression. Adobe is also doing a far-reaching task, that is, integrating their development tools to create a cohesive workflow.

From another perspective, Microsoft has no experience in developing design tools. In fact, they are not familiar with designers. Their tools can only be used on Windows platforms, which cut off half of the designer market from the very beginning. At this year's Microsoft mix conference, a participant asked Lynda (Director of lynda.com) during the Conference. If designers were familiar with expressions, they would be able to transfer them to the Windows platform. She replied that she was a Mac user, but she would not go to Windows. I applaud Lynda honestly. I believe this clearly proves that it is not easy for Microsoft to change the original tools for its creators.

Summary: Microsoft will establish a more comprehensive set of development tools and provide better integration tools. However, they are not willing to support MACs in fact, and they cannot deeply understand creativity and designers as their key points. Adobe has a deep understanding of the processes created, and their cross-platform support is incomparable to Microsoft.

Future trends

Although it is easy to be ignored, this is a very important issue. Why does Microsoft construct Silverlight? What is Microsoft's long-term intention? The main speculation is to seize the flash Ria application market. However, according to past observations, Microsoft's actions have been stable and I think this time will not be an exception.

Microsoft is often notorious for entering this field after a technology has been proven to be successful. They will throw a lot of money to gradually kill competition. Once a monopoly is formed, the development of technology will face great obstacles. Microsoft often gives up its support for cross-platform features due to temporary strange thoughts. Indeed, many of the cross-platform products they provide will eventually be abandoned or abandoned for some high-sounding reason (mapi in Entourage, ie, VBScript in office, Windows Media versioning and DRM, heck, or even halo ).

Adobe is not a charity, but they have proved that their products can successfully support cross-platform features, even if there are not many competitors in interactive web page development, however, Adobe has been improving its products. Silverlight will force them to do better. For example, if Silverlight is not available, it may be a question if we can see Flash player9 on Linux so quickly.

Conclusion: If Flash is eliminated, continuing to pursue cross-platform features will not be Microsoft's best choice, nor will it be difficult to guarantee continuous innovation. As a long-term Mac user, I really cannot trust Microsoft's intentions, but it is another pleasure to see Adobe's continuous improvement under the pressure of Silverlight.

Conclusion: In general, I believe that the potential of Silverlight, especially in the short term, is more effective when Microsoft makes a lot of money. In the near future, Microsoft's development tools may also be more robust and have a higher integration level than the tools provided by Adobe, however, simply supporting the features of the Windows platform will keep a large number of developers and designers away from Silverlight. I believe that the Silverlight interface will be a suitable runtime program, but it will not be packaged into byte computing like Flash Player, nor will it reach the installation penetration rate like flash.