

Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? - d4nt

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?
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ScottWhigham
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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byoung2
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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david927
You can develop Silverlight apps on a Mac, but only if it has an Intel chip.

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david927
_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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slater
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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sarvesh
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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zeynel1
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-...](http://algorithmatic.com/algorithm/6/version-10/naive-prime-
generator/)

