Silverlight Not Plugged In to Firefox 3
Michael Desmond, editor in chief of Redmond Developer News and
Desmond File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen
Richards, RDN's senior editor.
Microsoft is running into some compatibility issues with Silverlight and the
latest release
of Firefox. Available as a free download earlier this week, Firefox 3 is
a major upgrade to the popular Mozilla browser.
"From what I've seen, the older versions of Firefox are fine," said
John Papa, a senior .NET consultant at ASPSOFT and author of an upcoming book
on data access and Silverlight 2. "There is a list of browsers on the Silverlight
site and they all work very well – the only one I have seen issues with
is the new version of Firefox."
He continued, "Some of the biggest issues, quite honestly, are getting
the right version of Silverlight installed."
Tim Heuer, developer evangelist for Silverlight at Microsoft, addressed some
of the Firefox 3 issues
in his blog:
"The nutshell version is that there was an apparent change in how
NPAPI model was implemented in FF3. Despite the back and forth in the bug
report, Microsoft has made some servicing updates as well as SDK updates that
make FF3 and Silverlight play nice together. There still seems to be some
broader concern over the FF3 implementation (as there were a number of plugins
that stopped working as well), but at least a level of work around has been
established for Silverlight."
Cynics may say that Microsoft is probably in no hurry to make Silverlight compatible
with other operating systems and browsers, especially Firefox, its top competitor
in the browser market.
"I don't see it as a problem," Papa said, "because Microsoft
is totally aware that if they don't solve that problem, [Silverlight] is certainly
not going to take off. They really want it to be a viable option to Flash and
if they want that, they can't just make it work on IE."
Although the problems may have resulted from changes in Firefox, Silverlight
is still a brand-new technology, and many developers are waiting to see how
it all shakes out before they decide to build apps with it. Microsoft released
Silverlight
1 in September 2007 and Silverlight
2 beta 2 early last month.
Web developer Jeffrey McManus, the chief executive of Platform Associates and
Approver.com, said he's sticking with HTML and AJAX for now, and taking a wait-and-see
approach with Silverlight.
"I am holding off doing anything with it," he said. "If something
crazy happens and it really starts catching on or they were to make it more
open in the sense that it was less of a Microsoft proprietary kind of thing
-- I know there is the Moonlight implementation that the Mono guys are working
on...The learning curve and risk of working with Silverlight is not going to
outweigh the benefits of sticking with the trendier stuff – that's just
kind of where I am with that stuff."
Are you holding off on Silverlight development because the technology is proprietary?
Are you building apps with Silverlight, or waiting to see if it catches on?
Weigh in on all things Silverlight at krichards@reddevnews.com.
--Kathleen Richards
Posted on 06/19/2008