I was bored last night and I decided to figure out just what the heck Microsoft Silverlight was. Ever since mid-April, I’ve been hearing a lot about it on different websites, but I didn’t really grasp the whole concept of what it was beyond “Oh, it’s sorta like an Adobe Flash killer”.
So what I did was, I went to the Microsoft Silverlight website, installed the browser plugin for Firefox, and started viewing the Silverlight demos available online.
When I went to the Fox Movies Trailer Library that was made using Silverlight, I just went wide-eyed at how impressive this whole Silverlight thing really was.
The trailers were super duper crisp and clear and loaded like standard Flash-embedeed video. In fact, I would even say it loaded faster than a typical YouTube video (but I know YouTube video load times vary, so I guess that’s not a really fair comparison). Still, I was more than impressed with the quality and speed that the video rendered. Up until this point, the only way I knew of to get quality video like this was to install the cumbersome DivX plugin and watch the videos on Stage6 (which, honestly, aren’t all that great to begin with).
What exactly is Microsoft Silverlight?
Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about internet web technologies beyond what the user may experience, but I do know that if user experience is any indication of how great a new web technology is, then Microsoft Silverlight may very well be the next best thing to come around. It is so awesome. If you haven’t gotten around to installing the browser plugin, then go ahead and do so and start for yourself why Microsoft Silverlight is the wave of the future of web technologies!
Watch the [somewhat long] demo of Microsoft Silverlight below.
