Silverlight and Microsoft’s cross platform commitment
April 21, 2008
Given history, its sometimes hard to believe Microsoft’s cross platform commitments.
Here is a screen shot of the siverlight.net showcase page, it throws an exception when opened on my Mac on Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta .. but it does not throw any exception when I open the same page on my Windows XP virtual machine also running Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta.
I am willing to cut Microsoft some slack given that Silverlight 2 is in beta, but I hope to bring home the point that they do need to pay some more attention to cross platform compatibility, a truly cross platform plugin should behave the same everywhere.
Click here or on the image to enlarge it.
April 21st, 2008
Hey dude, where are the credits of this wordpress theme?
Is not your theme ahm?
April 21st, 2008
don’t be too dispondant: i’m getting SysFader and “memory can not be read” errors using WinXP, IE6 and MS Sharepoint…. FFS!
for my money, the only way to make ANY web application robust is to spend the effort to make it X-platform, not just work “downhill with a tailwind”.
the real value of x-plaftom: quality.
April 21st, 2008
@Jan the theme used is Hemingway by Kyle Neath and I just checked its license of the theme which does not require me to give credits on my blog. But now that you’ve mentioned I may put them up somewhere.
Mrinal
April 21st, 2008
@Barry
I’m not sure I get your point, could you please elaborate it a little bit
April 21st, 2008
sure.
the big argument to having a single-platform base for an application is that you can push the functionality. It’s a valid point that has done Windows well over the years. computer games could not be as powerful as they are now if they had to start with being x-platform.
but if you look at the Flash player, there’s been an awful lot of work to ensure it works consistantly from Win to OS-X to Linux (better late than never). In doing so, the applications are built to be more robust – they have to be.
this is why I’d like to see the AIR runtime not branch out with platform specific functionality – short term pain, sure, but long-term gain as I write apps that can run anywhere and have no fear to do so.
“a truly cross platform plugin should behave the same everywhere.”
exactly. application-wise, it’s in MS’s best interest to do so. MS spending a lot of effort to ensure Silverlight runs perfectly on other platforms will make their platform very robust and even the Windows versions,
the point about Sharepoint was that, spec’ing an application to run on a single platform may actually be doing it a disservive because it’s only considered to work in that environment – the “downhill with a tailwind” saying…
April 24th, 2008
[...] last post was about how I doubt Microsoft’s cross platform commitment with silverlight since I see the player behaving differently on different platforms even on a page thats is supposed [...]
May 4th, 2008
This exception is still thrown for me .. lets see how long before someone at Microsoft realizes this.
May 16th, 2008
They finally fixed it
.. I don’t see it now