Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2548975/microsoft-may-halt-development-work-on-silverlight-after-next-release

by exDM69 • 15 years ago

193 137 15 years ago

theverge.com

Interesting announcements from Adobe and Microsoft, one after another.

jrydberg• 15 years ago

I wonder what will happen to Microsoft Smooth Streaming if this happens.

bchjam• 15 years ago

the Mary Jo Foley article this one loosely references is here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverli...

forgotAgain2• 15 years ago

A tangent but why is "TheVerge" getting so much play on Techmeme's front page if it produces articles like this one?

tcarnell• 15 years ago

they should have probably made this decision before starting the first release!

joelthelion2• 15 years ago

Good riddance.

And once again, all the companies that decided to rely on a proprietary, non standard technology are going to get bitten.

DrJokepu• 15 years ago

In the meantime, there's no really reliable standard, cross-platform and cross-browser way to play back audio or video in the browser as major browser vendors still cannot agree on a single codec that would work everywhere.

cryptoz• 15 years ago

That magical method of playing audio or video has never existed, though. The elimination of the Silverlight plugin (and mobile Flash!), neither of which were reliable cross platform/cross-browser, should speed up the efforts put in to finding such a perfect solution.

WayneDB16• 15 years ago

Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6.

Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it.

Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?

forgotAgain2• 15 years ago

Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written. Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.

rbanffy17• 15 years ago

> Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6.

It will be much easier to move away from Silverlight than it is from VB6. VB6 will haunt us for generations.

watty3• 15 years ago

What was the alternative? HTML/CSS?? Hah.

nailer3• 15 years ago

Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

MatthewPhillips5• 15 years ago

Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.

apaprocki• 15 years ago

That isn't what I've heard (from people still at Microsoft). Everything points to Silverlight and WPF being frozen because the teams are pretty much broken up at this point.

Also, this is pretty clear as well:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070

dmethvin• 15 years ago

Get out your magnifying glass and find Silverlight and .NET on this diagram from Build:

http://blog.discountasp.net/build-conference-developers-have...

With Microsoft diagrams, the importance of the technology is proportional to the size of the box.

nailer3• 15 years ago

WP7 and 7.1 have just a few apps. Do you think WP8 won't use something like winjs ala Windows 8?

nobody31415925• 15 years ago

The year before the Silverlight team were saying that WPF is dead and Silverlight is the future.

Good job we all switched to Qt and C++

hkarthik• 15 years ago

I'm curious what Netflix has in the works to move off of Silverlight. I remember reading that their biggest problem with HTML5 players was the lack of good DRM options to please the studios.

sjwright• 15 years ago

Someone needs to explain to the studios about how computers are really great at copying stuff, which means DRM only ever has to be broken once by one person, and it doesn't matter if it's Netflix or Blu-ray or HBO.

The only thing Netflix needs to do is make it inconvenient to rip the stream, i.e. more difficult than downloading the same thing as a torrent. Anything more is pointless.

MatthewPhillips5• 15 years ago

No, Netflix has to prove that they aren't the point of failure. Which means DRM is a requirement. Content owners demand it.

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

Why would they want to move off something that works? The plugins will be getting security updates after all.

lallysingh• 15 years ago

.. fixes for OS updates? Comparability with newer drivers?

nobody31415925• 15 years ago

One code stream for obsolete windows a different one for new windows, another for iPhone/OSX, another for Android......

ConstantineXVI3• 15 years ago

Likely what they do on every other platform already; a sandboxed HTML5 "native" app. They could also take the NaCl route like they do for ChromeOS; but I don't think NaCl is available in plugin form yet (not that it matters for Win8; plugins of any kind are verboten in Metro mode)

kree10• 15 years ago

What does Netflix use for their iOS app? That's not based on Silverlight is it?

hello_moto• 15 years ago

Wonder what will happen to NetFlix for web. Fallback to Flash I'm guessing...

feintruled• 15 years ago

They already have a HTML5 client, created for the PS3:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-...

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Are Netflix's streaming videos DRM'd? On a closed system like the PS3, an HTML5 video player might be possible, but how would they protect their video in a HTML5 video player on a desktop computer? DRM'd desktop video seems like a good opportunity for Flash and Silverlight since HTML5 is unlikely to offer might DRM support.

d4nt2• 15 years ago

Until a year or two ago there was a stalemate as far as "rich web" development technologies goes. Neither flash, Silverlight or HTML5 was the clear winner. I remember people being incredulous that the iPad didn't support Flash, saying that while it might be ok for the iPhone to not support it, nobody would take the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash.

In a way, I think it might be the combined weight of the iPhone and iPad that's broken the stalemate in HTML5's favour. Apple sold so many of them, that website makers had to take notice.

When Microsoft announced that Windows 8 metro mode (which may well be the only mode available for low power Win8 tablets) would not support Silverlight, I think the game was well and truly up.

eli• 15 years ago

It doesn't help that Flash was deficient in a variety of ways. I think this was Adobe's fight to lose.

beagle32• 15 years ago

Stalemate?

Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3.

I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the time being, though not for long, Flash is still among the royalty). Silverlight had always been a wannabe.

d4nt2• 15 years ago

I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice.

EDIT: I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.

Volpe• 15 years ago

I don't think that's true.

Canvas tag was in safari (both desktop and mobile) and Firefox. Flash (at it's core) is just a canvas you can draw on.

2 Years ago, Flash (or Flex) was immature (for RIA), had poor tools, and poor runtime support (i.e half implemented exception handling, memory leaks etc), impossible to test.

HTML by comparison had a lot of tools for interaction models, and was only immature around canvas (animation/effects). Was easy to test etc.

They were kind of the inverse of each other. Flash was definitely not king. The company I worked at, was working on one of the largest flash apps around, and we constantly had problems with flash, to the point where a silverlight or HTML5 port was considered. (Not sure what they ended up doing).

watty3• 15 years ago

HTML5 support still sucks. I work with companies daily who are forced to use old versions of IE. So, we're forced to use plain HTML to build our business on, technology is going backwards.

jonpaul3• 15 years ago

I am/was a Silverlight fan. When Microsoft made it clear that they were focusing on JavaScript (I realize it's not standard's compliant) with Windows 8, I finally spent a lot of time considering the situation. Apparently a lot of the Silverlight team quit or was moved to other divisions. The wriitng was on the wall.

For the last three years, I'd find anyway to build a RIA in anything but JS/HTML. I'd use GWT/Cappuccino/Silverlight/Flex, etc. After Microsoft's move, I finally just embraced JS/CoffeeScript; I love every bit of it.

bostonpete• 15 years ago

> nobody would take the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash

That sounds like revisionist history to me. Plenty of people complained about the lack of Flash and speculated that Apple might eventually have to give in and allow it, but I don't think any significant number of people suggested or believed that the iPad wouldn't be taken seriously without it.

viggity• 15 years ago

I "get" it when it comes to silverlight for public facing websites. Really. I do. The general populace doesn't want to have to install a plugin. But what about intranet apps? Silverlight is so incredibly easy to work with (compared to html/css/js) that there are lots of companies that have built intranet apps with it because they control the end point.

I really hope this isn't true.

rbanffy17• 15 years ago

> But what about intranet apps?

Remember when IE6 was so incredibly easy to work with? Remember how much effort has been dedicated to port those internal "web applications" that worked on one specific browser?

WayneDB16• 15 years ago

You're comparing apples to oranges. IE6 is a browser, Silverlight is a plug-in. Using Silverlight doesn't mean that you can't switch browsers.

kstrauser• 15 years ago

A lot of companies that said the same about ActiveX are still limping along with IE6. I'd rather ask my boss to budget for more development time than to suggest rolling out a single-platform solution in 2011.

The takeaway is this: don't build your mission critical internal apps on a Microsoft browser plugin. This has never worked out well.

arctangent2• 15 years ago

But why require your developers to learn another set of technologies? Much better IMHO to just have a good web development team who can make internal applications too.

mweimer• 15 years ago

I think most corporations already have people with C#/XAML skills.

WayneDB16• 15 years ago

Oh, so everybody should just do HTML no matter what, from now on, for ever and ever, amen?

Nobody should ever invent a competing technology because HTML is good enough for you? Is that it?

sunchild• 15 years ago

One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers without painting yourself into yet another proprietary corner.

xradionut2• 15 years ago

Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...

notatoad2• 15 years ago

an intranet is the sign of a lazy IT department. put that stuff up on the internet, let employees access the resources they need wherever they are, from whatever device they are using.

every discussion i've ever seen about advancing the state of the web, the sticking point has always been "what about intranet/corporate networks?". well, if you run an intranet, fuck you. stop using the idea that you control the endpoint as an excuse to write crappy apps. you shouldn't be controlling that end point, you should be giving your users freedom to access your services in as many ways as possible rather than limiting their productivity by restricting their usage to your approved endpoints.

rbanffy17• 15 years ago

Not that simple. There are tons of rules and regulations businesses may have to follow. Some data may never leave company premises. Some data may never leave the room it exists.

platonichvn• 15 years ago

It's unfortunate but it was inevitable. HTML 5 is definitely the future. Although, the ability to write an app using type-safe, object oriented code that can run on both the client and server was very compelling.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

It's a great day, both Flash and Silverlight are on the road to obsolete.

I look forward to our new HTML5 overlord.

alecco• 15 years ago

Well, now that you mention it...

SGML/HTML/XML/CSS/JS have the true open standard good side instead of anticompetitive proprietary grip. But let's not fool ourselves, those languages are terrible and backwards. Same with HTTP. Also HTML5 still falls short of many missing features on the web.

I'm hoping for a new generation of a better set of languages to take over. But this feels like hoping for x86 to go obsolete, even Intel couldn't kill it.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well.

I hope that someday the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a true bytecode VM-in-browser.

JonoW• 15 years ago

Damn, we're getting ever closer to Atwoods law!

"Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-...

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

I don't know what Silverlight does under the covers, but the event handling language in Flash is Actionscript, which is a dialect of Javascript. So in that sense we're already there.

ConstantineXVI3• 15 years ago

Silverlight is just C# (or theoretically any CLR language) with XAML layouts and a specialized set of libraries.

dos14• 15 years ago

Good riddance! I spent the last 5 months at a gig working on a massive Silverlight 4 application. I've been a web guy forever, but I took this job thinking it would be good to learn how the other half lives. After experiencing the pain and drudgery of working with Silverlight, I couldn't be happier that it's going away.

The most maddening part of working on a Silverlight app was that things that are dead simple with HTML/JS/CSS are tons of work with SL. I was always amazed at the gymnastics required to get even simple UI functionality to work.

Xaml itself was a problem. Why in god's name to we need another superset of XML? Especially with all that atrocious binding syntax.

And also, every time you want to see a UI change you have to build the XAP. When you have tons of Xaml is takes forever to compile to see a minor change!

jonpaul3• 15 years ago

Interesting... I as a Silverlight dev now learning JS/HTML/CSS would say the complete opposite. I find it very difficult to create similar layout functionality like DockPanel and friends. Any tips?

dos14• 15 years ago

You know it's interesting that you're seeing lots of pain going the other way. I realized part of my issue with Silverlight was just how different it was from what I was used to. I don't like things I don't understand :) That being said, I did like the Stack Panel and the Dock Panel. I liked them because they worked more closely to the way HTML layout works. It was the Grid that I despised. The markup was tough to follow (putting Grid.Row="" and Grid.Column="" for each element inside the grid was stupid) and ultimately positioning in Silverlight was very much about absolute position and fixed dimensions.

As far as tips - vertical stack panels are just a series of unfloated divs (or other block element). Horizontal stack panels are a series of floated divs.

Vertical positioning with HTML/CSS can be tricky, especially in older browsers. line-height and padding/margin are you friends :)

loarabia2• 15 years ago

I see your gripe with the REPL loop and binding but . . .

Would you be willing to share what was easy with HTML/CSS/JS that was tons of work with SL and what gymnastics you had to go through? I'm genuinely curious.

dos14• 15 years ago

For one thing, with Prism, binding events to view model methods was a giant pain, specifically if you wanted to pass event args. I know I ended up having to write a number of attached properties to handle different event binding scenarios. With jQuery it's a cinch to handle user interaction. (I guess my major gripe in this case is with Prism, which is perhaps separate from SL).

Further, text wrapping and layout were my biggest pain points in SL. I wasn't used to having fixed dimensions on everything. That really bugged me.

Finally, I didn't like the visual state manager at all. There's not really an analogous equivalent in JS/HTML, but for a "rich" internet platform it certainly didn't seem like the way to go to me. I have to run now, but I'll try and think up some more of my pain points and edit as appropriate.

jjcm2• 15 years ago

I was a ruby on rails dev for about 3 years up until a year ago, when I got hired by Microsoft. I now work almost entirely on the XAML/C# stack. Honestly, I really like it. There are some very key improvements in the stack that I see over HTML/JS. Javascript is a great language for small and simple scripts, but for larger js-heavy applications it gets pretty hairy quick. Likewise, html is a fantastic markup language for webpages, but for embedded applications it's horrible.

Silverlight in itself was never meant for the web, it was meant for more robust desktop applications, and it shows. The C#/XAML stack works great for complex applications. Likewise, html/js aren't that fantastic of languages to work with when doing embedded applications; but they're a great team for the web.

watty3• 15 years ago

XAML worse than HTML/CSS? What about the fun task of hacking your HTML/CSS app to look the same across browsers?

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Wait, you're looking to Silverlight for cross OS/browser support? ha!

chadaustin• 15 years ago

What will Microsoft do for 3D on the web, then? They've said the won't implement WebGL and Silverlight 5 + XNA was supposedly their solution.

hvs2• 15 years ago

If I were a betting man, I would guess "build some new proprietary technology", but they may just go back to WebGL now that they are committing to HTML5.

5hoom• 15 years ago

I really do hope they decide to go with WebGL.

Keeping a fragmented ecosystem with a 'WebDirectX' or some other proprietary new tech will just slow overall progress in this area. For web developers doing 3D it means "This site requires IE/This site doesn't support IE" unless you can support two parallel codebases.

jongraehl• 15 years ago

At Microsoft you have a bunch of brilliant programmers who are forced to follow "strategic direction" from above. Even if they wanted to, there's no way they can continue working on a mothballed project they still believe in.

People who relied on the Silverlight plugin certainly cannot continue to develop it, either.

Long-run, there's more security in relying on software created by a sufficiently large and capable community of enthusiasts. Such software will never die if it's good enough to be useful - sunk costs, NIH, and all that.

The "strategic direction" of a community won't change except by consensus. People will enter and leave. By the time the community withers and dies, nobody cares any more.

nobody31415925• 15 years ago

I would love to know what Microsoft's strategic direction is.

While announcing lots of C++ love for Visual Studio and promises of C++11 compliance they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows

The 'official toolkit' is WPF and whatever managed C++ is called today. But with Silverlight dead what future does it's under regarded cousin have?

So no problem we all switch to it's new tablet/phone OS. Only they won't tell us which of the windows phone toolkits are going to be on tablets and PCs - if any.

Or are we supposed to be developing all our apps for Azure and the cloud now?

Or are they just abandoning the PC like HP and we write everything in HTML5 for the browser?

pseale3• 15 years ago

The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the Silverlight API.

Silverlight used to be promoted as:

* Flex/Flash compete * Public web compete (I never recommended it for such) * line-of-business (not publicly available) apps * (recent) Windows Phone 7

Silverlight is now promoted as:

* line-of-business apps * Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet)

Metro is now promoted for:

* Win8 tablet apps * Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?) * possibly Win Phone 8 apps

I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for .NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward. ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks. WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.

Luyt• 15 years ago

"they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows"

I'm still writing to the native WIN32 API (albeit via Borland's C++Builder which uses the VCL 'Visual Component Library', the same library that powers Delphi) and that stuff still runs on Windows 7.

sunsu• 15 years ago

So what does this mean for Windows Phone 7? Will Silverlight eventually go away for it as well? Since the majority of WP7 apps are developed with Silverlight (i think?) what will replace it?

iam• 15 years ago

They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE, providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other [desktop] browsers.

Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still playing catch up to Chrome.

At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x faster than any browser out there.

Hominem• 15 years ago

I have been working on a silverlight app for almost 2 years. We started in silverlight 2 and are now on silverlight 4. There have been a million twists and turns but our business demanded things that simply are not practical from HTML/JS.

People within both Microsoft and Google use my app, and I recently heard from our division president that they were "blown away".

With this news the mandate came down to prepare to "rewrite in python". How is that for marching orders. Makes no sense but management is so anti-Microsoft at this point they are irrational.

As a developer I have sunk years of time and effort into this. I guess I can take my XAML knowledge and build windows 8 LOB apps down the street.

Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

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