Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular?

ScottWhigham · on Aug 30, 2009

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).

byoung2 · on Aug 29, 2009

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?).

david927 · on Aug 29, 2009

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

david927 · on Aug 29, 2009

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.

slater · on Aug 29, 2009

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.

sarvesh · on Aug 29, 2009

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.

zeynel1 · on Aug 29, 2009

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-...