Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular?

Posted by d4nt on Saturday August 29, 2009 @03:39PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I mean, I work for a Microsoft Gold partner building (mostly) internal business apps, and I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely. I'm exactly the sort of person who should be switching to Silverlight, it seems like it's designed specifically to save people like me a whole load of trouble. But I (and many of my peers) just haven't gone for it and I can't really explain why. Any ideas?

( 7 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by ScottWhigham on Saturday August 29, 2009 @08:12PM (#793844)

I do all of those as well (ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript) yet mine is that I have no interest in learning Silverlight for the same reason that I have no desire to learn Flash. I think a huge failure of Silverlight is MSFT's thinking that, "Well if we can just get half of all the millions of ASP.NET programmers to start using it, it'll be h-u-g-e!" But as an ASP.NET developer, I don't think of myself as someone who would develop Silverlight. And there's no way I want to learn a new, has-the-potential-to-be-dropped technology right now what with VS 2005, VS2008, VS2010, VS2012 and so forth (i.e. there's too much material too quickly).

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by byoung2 on Saturday August 29, 2009 @03:50PM (#793541)

Probably a perception thing. I haven't looked into Silverlight much, but my gut says it's probably geared toward .NET developers (I could be completely wrong here). It is hard to beat Flash integration with Adobe CS4, especially on Macs (can you develop Silverlight apps on Mac?).

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by david927 on Saturday August 29, 2009 @04:31PM (#793591)

You can develop Silverlight apps on a Mac, but only if it has an Intel chip.

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by david927 on Saturday August 29, 2009 @04:33PM (#793593)

I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely

If you switch, get ready to spend you hours instead banging your head on Silverlight.

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by slater on Saturday August 29, 2009 @03:58PM (#793555)

one thing is the kinda surreptitious way they try to get you to adopt silverlight: "hey, did you know [insert major sporting/cultural/political event] is available as a streaming download? BUT! You have to install silverlight first"

plus, i think many ppl in the more tech-savvy crowd are left wondering why they have to install a plugin for stuff that's already "solved", namely Flash.

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by sarvesh on Saturday August 29, 2009 @05:06PM (#793622)

There is no official support for Linux, you will need to use moonlight. Until 3.0 font rendering was a major issue, hence NYTimes switched Adobe Air. Creating a stand alone app is harder compared to Air wasn't even possible in Silverlight 2. It still doesn't have printing capabilities even in version 3.

The bright spot of using Silverlight is the programming language, you can code in C# or F#. But considering that you will need to host the solution on a Windows makes it a more expensive to scale. That probably drives away a lot of startups.

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Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? by zeynel1 on Saturday August 29, 2009 @04:37PM (#793595)

Doesn't support Chrome. I was trying to view algorithms here but Chrome was not listed.

http://algorithmatic.com/algorithm/6/version-10/naive-prime-...

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