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We need competition. Adobe Flash sucks, it's uberbuggy, especially on Linux. Maybe Moonlight will be better, maybe Adobe will get it's act together to increase performance and incease stability. Users are winners here unless Microsoft installs Silverlight by default and I doubt they would go so far because they'd be sued out of billions of dollars in such case IMHO.

I don't care if it's free/open, give me something that works.

We need competition. Adobe Flash sucks, it's uberbuggy, especially on Linux.

Well, I wouldn't actually say it sucks, but I wouldn't actually call it great either. I find that it crashes Mozilla Seamonkey daily on Fedora 9. It is mostly video that crashes. I figure more competition is good since the Linux version sure needs help. Eventually a mono based Silverlight plugin will probably be available. I would try it out.

Edited 2008-06-06 23:14 UTC

Moonlight is already available, though support is really only there for Silverlight v1.1 ATM. Silverlight 2.0 support is under development, despite there being a profile 2.0 download.

You have to compile yourself if you want movie playback.

http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Does that include the DRM-part ??? ;o)

hmm, that was rather confusing. I don't know why someone marked down your post given that it is a well known issue with Flash - the fact that it is a royal memory sucking plugin which can turn any speedy browser into treacle.

On the matter of crappiness, I couldn't get over the reply by an Adobe manager on his blog about Flash for *NIX; "Oh, we're improving it, we are still learning lot about the platform" - YOU'RE LEARNING ON THE JOB?! that was my reaction; end users are the guinea pigs for this companies inability to find decent *NIX programmers?

At this momment, Flash is at the same situation which Netscape 4.x was at; decrapit, unstable, bloated, unreliable, and in dire need of some competition (for those clueless, it was Netscape who made the first shot on extending standards).

Microsoft has a new direction - ignore the sweaty balled man running the company; he is nothing more than front man to the real decisions that are made in the company. They may speak about the 'operating system' being important, but the reality, the more important issues they're facing are outside of that - hence the reason why there is no animosty towards mono, moonlight and so forth.

To be fair *NIX is a faster moving and more diverse target to a far greater extent than both windows and Mac. Also the number of programmers available with deep multi platform *nix experience in the type of programming required for flash are probably very very few.

At the end of the day most non-trivial programming tasks are unique enough that learning on the job is the only way to get any significant experience with the hard details of that particular project.

Linux desktop users represent a tiny percentage of the market. I'm surprised there is a player for it at all.

Edited 2008-06-07 11:19 UTC

Linux desktop has nothing to do with it.

Flash is now almost a requirement for a full-fledged Internet experience. It hardly matters what type of user you are.

I would agree with the Netscape 4 comparison if it was flash 8 you were talking about. In Flash 9 they have cleaned up the data model quite a lot and AS3 is a big step forward. AS3 still isn't a beautiful language but it's getting there. It's not painful to code in anymore and executes in a decent speed.

Flash 10 has h/w support for rendering and 3d. This will (probably/hopefully) make flash a viable VM for other things than annoying ad-banners.

That's like saying the local Mafia needs some competition! We'd be better off without them, than with more of them. Silverlight just brings more opportunities for lock in, and less support for devices.

Apple leaving Flash out of the iPhone was probably the best move in years to getting brain dead webdesigners off of Flash and onto just plain HTML/Javascript.

The first priority of web technology is a good way to do rich application interfaces that work well cross platform.

The FOSS community has shown it either doesn't realize that, or just doesn't care, because its not like MS is doing some innovative market analysis here, it is blinding obvious, and has been for almost as long as there has been a web.

In all fairness some of us try. I've put a lot of work into Vexi to solve this niche.

http://vexi.sourceforge.net/

I think the reason there isn't an OSS Flash-like project is because of the huge marketing effort that would be involved to get people to use it.

I think OGG Vorbis is a good example of the difficulty an OSS Flash-like product would face. OGG is superior in all the important ways to MP3 (smaller, better sound, unencumbered), but it never really took off. Adobe and Microsoft can market something like Silverlight and Flash better than OSS developers could.

If an OSS project made a Flash replacement and could get the Mozilla guys to include the player in Firefox, they might have a chance.

I disagree. Mp3 is a "good enough" standard, flash sucks for making interfaces.

I never said Flash didn't suck.

Did you mean framework instead of format?

Anyway, these frameworks exist in order to solve a problem. What alternative (sans Moonlight) does the FOSS community have to offer?

Im still waiting for the Open Source proposal.

So get to work on your free os with your free development tools developing an open source and free alternative!

Edited 2008-06-07 13:55 UTC

It could be worse. Remember Java Applets?

Actually, there are much less risks with java Applets, all the code runs in a sandbox, and it have to be digitally signed to do any real harm on your computer.

Now days they also load very fast, and will load even faster Java 6 update 10 gets out in a few months. So I wourld say still java have its place in a browser.

However, standard java is targeted to business applications, and it is not as easy as in flash to develop annoying ads jumping up and down on your webpage.
For that, Sun have developed JavaFX,

In the old days, applets sucked. Then along came Flash, which was smaller and could do animation and movies better. So, even though Flash sucks in it's own way (huge cpu and memory hog), it ate Java applets lunch.

But applets are much better now. I get much better performance out of applets than flash.

Flash does tend to bring the browser, and host system, to it's knees.

Meanwhile, Java on the desktop received some serious optimization over the last 2-3 years.

And JavaFX is going to make Java much easier for the web and for various devices.

They are also shipping full media codecs now, fully built into JavaFX.

To top it off, in Java 6, update 10 (soon to be released), they are coming out with the "Java Kernel" - only the core needed bits, reduced down to a 3 meg download, while the rest of the full Java SE (about 10 more megs) are downloaded separately as needed and in the background.

That's good stuff.

And being that Java is fully cross platform (runs great on Linux!), is open source, has the Java community process, and has multiple vendor support, I'd have to say that it's the way to go over both Flash and Silverlight.

Liking Silverlight for what it does is like encouraging weeds [to grow] because they have pretty flowers

Wow, what a cunning analogy - as cunning as a fox what earned his PHd in cunning from Cambridge and was then given the position of Dean of Cunning.

Baldrick?

Amen to that.

Flash is very annoying and overused. Just give me plain ol' HTML/Javascript, with a little bit of DHTML/Ajax techniques (only a little, please), with quality content and a clean, simple presentation, and I'm happy.

Web 2.0 == Bloated js, AJAX everywhere, and rounded corners. Doesn't have anything to do with flash (or silverlight)

The problem with flash is it is hard to use it for stuff beyond movies (which is what it was designed for). Silverlight is designed specifically for responsive, rich interfaces, and will hopefully deliver something that people have been trying to do (and failing horribly) since sun first stuck an applet in a web page.