I don't get it... Flash is ubiquitous.. it's on almost
every PC out there and has a huge developer base
behind it, yet these people are implying Silverlight
is THE platform to beat. What does Silverlight have
that Flash doesn't (besides a huge bankroll behind it
and some very green developers)?
Chrome's JavaScript poses challenge to Silverlight
Summary
Experts speaking at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Australia warn that JavaScript will continue to get speedier, making it the biggest rival of Silverlight technology.
Topics
The biggest rival for Microsoft's next-generation Silverlight web technology will be JavaScript, not Adobe's ubiquitous Flash, according to experts speaking at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Sydney on Friday.
"I think that the next 18 months we're going to see a 100- to 1,000-fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered," Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience, days after Google released its Chrome browser, which features faster JavaScript technology.
Jonas Follesø, senior consultant at Capgemini, agreed, saying JavaScript would continue to get speedier and Chrome will become "massively" faster than it is.
"Now Google has stepped up and released a browser with jittered JavaScript and JavaVM, making this really, really, really fast," he said.
The consultant said that whenever he thought people had reached a limit about what could be done inside a browser using just JavaScript, some "cool JavaScript writer" came up and showed him how to do more.
"It's going to be hard to tell if it's going to be Silverlight or JavaScript we're going to use for our applications," he said. "I think in the end JavaScript is going to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash is."
An audience member questioned the panel of experts later on whether he should "be out buying JavaScript books" now the language had been "put on steroids."
Harry Pierson, Microsoft program Manager, replied that: "JavaScript is a very odd language for most developers." Pierson said it was more interesting to do higher-level development and if necessary compile it down to JavaScript.
Hanselman had a different opinion, saying that although it was a "freaky, weird language", it was possible to do object-oriented programming. "The JavaScript I used and hated in Netscape 4 is not the same JavaScript we have today," he said. "So yeah, I think you should get some JavaScript books."
Follesø said even if souped-up JavaScript became dominant, he thought Silverlight was going to be big, especially in the enterprise when 'fun' Web 2.0 applications come to roost. "For the intranet, when the users expect the same kind of user experience it's not that easy to really build that stuff in HTML and JavaScript so Silverlight might be a lot easier alternative," he said.
Talkback Most Recent of 42 Talkback(s)
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itinko5th Sep 2008 -
Great JavaScript performance means that Flash is relegated to kids games,
video playback, etc. SilverSheeet will be on the trash heap of history.
DonnieBoy5th Sep 2008 -
What it has going for it is it's not Flash...
Flash has the same perception problems that Vista has.
People perceive that it's slow, cumbersome and buggy.
As with Vista, some of the knocks are legitimate while
others are just plain FUD. Silverlight certainly
isn't nearly as ubiquitous as Flash, but it has been
able to leverage the Microsoft bankroll along with
some extremely high profile wins like the Olympics.
Neither Flash nor Silverlight has the developer
community that Javascript has though. It'll be
interesting to look back in 5 years and see how each
has fared. I'm guessing that each will fare well with
none of the three emerging head and shoulders above
the others. Each has their strengths and weaknesses
and each has a loyal developer base. To me, that
spells competition...always a good thing.
jasonp@...5th Sep 2008 -
You forgot to mention
People perceive that it's slow, cumbersome and buggy.
... and sucks CPU like an industrial vacuum line.
Just having a Flash instance on your system will cause your fans to spool up, and after about three you'll have your CPU totally redlined.
Yagotta B. Kidding5th Sep 2008 -
That is so true!!! I can remember when ZDNet had a problem with some
ads sucking a lot of CPU due to flash. My laptop was sluggish, was actually running hot, with the fans running constantly. I downloaded flash block, and restarted, and IMMEDIATELY there was a huge difference.DonnieBoy5th Sep 2008 -
That's rubbish
If you're using the latest version of Flash and the code has been wrtitten properly, resource usage is minimal (4-5%) which is nothing on the average pc. Of course you can get badly developed flash files just as easily as badly developed javascript. But the flash player is the ogre you make it out to at all.
GOTBO9th Sep 2008 -
Two clear advantages
"What does Silverlight have that Flash doesn't"
SilverLight is truly multithreaded and allows you to code in the same language on both client and server side. Among all RIAs, only SilverLight and JavaFX are multithreaded. Flash and Javascript are not despite all the hype.
With SilverLight, you use C#, VB, Python, Ruby and maybe more on both client side and server side, which is huge in terms of the low cost of development, maintenance, evolve and so on. With the other RIAs, it's client side running one language and server side running another, which creates unnecessary hassle no developer likes.
LBiege5th Sep 2008 -
au contraire mon frere
yes, but if the user base has Flash and doesn't have Silverlight, what's the point of all this glorious language independence? And how the heck can you run C# on client side, don't you need .NET installed for that? What happens to OS X, Linux users? Would your client advocate deploying a site that requires people to download Silverlight and doesn't support non Windows platforms? Heck Silverlight doesn't even run on my Firefox 3 browser on Vista!itinko29th Sep 2008 -
RE: Chrome's JavaScript poses challenge to Silverlight
@itinko
"And how the heck can you run C# on client side, don't you need .NET installed for that?"
First of Silverlight works on Firefox (I've used it...I don't know what your specific problem is). .NET doesn't run on the client side. Instead a plug-in (Active X for IE, Java applet for non Active-X browsers) interprets the XAML that is streamed from the server. It works on OS X, I don't know about Linux...but there is Moonlight for that. It's a plugin that you download like flash. If you don't have a problem downloading the flash plugin, I'm not sure why you would with Silverlight. I'm not telling you to jump on the Silverlight bandwagon. I'm just saying that the reasons that you have posted may not be sound.
bmonsterman19th Nov 2010 -
We don't need to learn a new language
For .Net developers, Silverlight is easy to transition to and easy to incorporate into our projects. We can use the same business logic/classes we wrote for other systems in .Net. If you're an old school EJB developer, Silverlight is probably as strange as Flash, but if you do .Net now, Silverlight is extremely easy.
Silverlight is more acompetator of Flex than just Flash, because it has a lot of client/server power. you can also share sessions with your web sessions and interact with multiple servers at the same time (with special permissions).
Since Silverlight is part of Microsoft, you automatically get the latest Silverlight plug-in with Windows updates. That bankroll you're talking about comes from the real power of Microsoft--marketshare. I remember the arguments from Netscape about it being ubiquitous and IE being slow and error-prone. Now the only people who use non-IE browsers are Mac users and people who won't use Microsoft out of principle ("I'm not using MS and you can't make me!").
Flash is still good and there are lots of existing apps and future MS-hater code camps that will keep it around. But its a hard sell for new projects using .Net compared with Silverlight; the art is done by artists and the code is done by the same web devs that do the rest of the site.
A Gray5th Sep 2008 -
Flash also has the benefit of dealing with media
in a standardized way that makes this seem a lot more like a
battle between Silverlight and Flash (and all the flavors of
Flash--AIR, Pacifica, etc.) that facilitate rapid application
development when calling client media assets/devices.
Mitch Ratcliffe5th Sep 2008 -
Just MS trying to belittle a competitor
Yeah, the choice of phrasing and everything in this
article seems pretty obviously just to make Flash seem
"small", but so it goes under the radar due to him
cloaking it in a compliment to Google's Chrome.
As a web developer I say Flash/Javascript all the way,
those two work together very well together actually.
GrailWebD8th Sep 2008 -
Interesting that they are so frank!! But, with JavaScript performance
gaining by orders of magnitude, and other real innovation going on in the browser, SilverSheeeet is a dead man walking.DonnieBoy5th Sep 2008 -
JavaFX...
What are your thoughts on JavaFX? Does it suffer the same fate as Silverlight as well? Or does it have a different future? Insights appreciated.
I hope you are not a mindless Microsoft-hate spewing moron that trolls the web - I am guessing you used the term Silversheet in a funny way than in a moronic way - not sure.
tick tock5th Sep 2008 -
Well, Java suffers from being too tightly controlled by Sun still. They
need to get it completely out of Sun, similar to JavaScript. JavaFX is just a branding gimmick to compete with Silverlight branding. I think that eventually, as part of the standard for a browser, we also need a standard sandboxed VM that JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, etc, can all run on. We need to be sending byte codes down to the browser as well, NOT source code as with JavaScript. Though, it is great to be able to embed little programs right into a web page.
But, proprietary platforms in general that do not allow industry-wide innovation, and can be uses as toll gates will not fly. The internet exploded onto the scene last century because it was all standards based. The rich interactive Internet with offline capabilities is about to explode onto the scene, but it will be based on standard parts like JavaScript, where innovation is happening all over, NOT proprietary stuff where all innovation is controlled, and toll gates are set up.DonnieBoy5th Sep 2008
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