On the topic of Silverlight: is there a reason beyond Microsoft's economic whims that Silverlight couldn't be implemented for non-IE browsers? And if it were implemented across browsers, would it easily work across different OS's?

Or is Silverlight not really a browser plugin like Flash?

(As is probably obvious, I'm totally ignorant of how browser plugins, Flash, Silverlight, and most other things work.)

I believe Silverlight works in Firefox actually.

I don't use it, but the trypython.org page has a statement:

"Target browsers are Firefox 2 & 3, Safari and IE 7 & 8. (It won't work in other browsers until there is a version of Silverlight that works with them.)"

Thanks. I did a little googling. It appears that Silverlight works (at least marginally) in several browsers on two OS's (Windows and OS X).

I'm still curious about why Silverlight works for, say, Firefox on OS X, but not Firefox on Linux. I understand that Microsoft probably wants to prevent Silverlight from working on Linux, but I'm curious whether it's something hard to do because Linux doesn't have X, Y, and Z that Silverlight requires, or is it relatively easy to do (if you had control of the codebase).

There's an open source implementation of Silverlight, called Moonlight:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

I've never used it before, so I don't know how well it works or anything.

I don't actually want to use a proprietary tool like Silverlight, or an open reimplementation, but I appreciate the effort to make the comment.

Thanks.