I’m sure a lot of people will be enthralled by Microsoft’s attempt to win market share from Adobe’s Flash, but they’ve so far left some of us out in the cold.
Unless I boot into Windows or switch to my Mac I can’t download or see anything produced by SilverLight!
Of course that wouldn’t be too bad, except the official site doesn’t even check to see which browser / OS you are using, so I’m left with a page refreshing a couple of times before hitting a link that takes me to a really “useful” Microsoft error message:
We’re sorry, but we were unable to service your request. You may wish
to choose from the links below for information about Microsoft products
and services.
It’s only when you go digging around the site that you discover that they are planning support for Linux in conjunction with their new friends chez Novell.
Am I just another whining Linux user?
Maybe, but their site actually states:
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering
the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive
applications (RIAs) for the Web. (my emphasis)
If they’d been honest and said that it was only available on Windows and Mac I wouldn’t have any reason to complain!
It’s not properly cross-platform either – one example that’s already bugging me is that there isn’t full support for proxies on a Mac. This prevents me (as a user of an institutional network) from seeing anything that uses Silverlight and is a real pain, especially as Flash works without problems.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb412386.aspx#proxy_servers_and_streaming
Meh, Flash only works on MacOS, Windows and x86 Linux these days, anyway. The Mono project is apparently in the process of putting together a Linux Silverlight.
Daithi: Try using Authoxy (http://www.hrsoftworks.net/Products.html). It’s free and provides a local non-authenticated forwarding proxy which most things will work with. You used to need it to run Skype in Trinity, for instance.