Why Not Silverlight

Recently, Microsoft has been pushing its relatively new Silverlight web technology. Microsoft is posing it as a competitor to Adobe's Flash technology. I don't like either of these technologies due to their proprietary nature. Flash has been around for quite a while, and is nearly ubiquitous. It has become so prevalent that it is very annoying to browse the Internet without it. I am not going to help Microsoft create the ubiquity of another such proprietary technology.

Microsoft is trying to push out Silverlight via Windows Update. On all the computers I keep updated, I have specifically opt-ed to not install this update. There is an open source implementation of Silverlight being written, but even if it is written to spec, Microsoft's will inevitably have bugs, and their implementation will become a de facto standard, similar to how the rendering engine of Internet Explorer 6 was, for a long time, the de facto standard of how web pages should be rendered.

The same holds true for Flash; there is an open-source implementation, but it does not work nearly as well as Adobe's implementation. This continues to be a point of annoyance as Linux distributions generally don't come with proprietary code on the install disc.