An Apple user has no personality other than his Mac
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Microsoft launches Silverlight version 5
SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has announced that Silverlight 5 is available to download.
The 7MB free web browser plug-in aims to help developers, er, develop applications for the web as well as desktop and mobile devices. Silverlight 5 includes performance improvements such as hardware decoding and brings the 'Trusted Application' model to the web browser.
Microsoft said that Silverlight 5 features include: "Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives."
Overall the firm touts more than 40 new features in the software. The trusted application model makes its first appearance in Silverlight 5 and "when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean[s] users won't need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks", said Microsoft.
The Redmond firm has just about stuck to its promise of releasing Silverlight 5 in the second half of this year, a statement it made in December 2010. The plug-in is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and, of course, Internet Explorer.
However, Microsoft seems to be abandoning use of Silverlight with its other software products, so we tend to doubt there will ever be a Silverlight 6. µ
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I don't agree 'hindsight', I like silverlight to be easily avoidable by having it be something that is only used on MS websites and thus something I can easily not have at all, without affecting the too many things that rely on .NET like graphics driver settings UI's
Also the purpose of silverlight is spying in browsers, and that's not what .net was designed for really.
Wandering aimlessly, that's my take.
If I am to use policies to allow silerlight app out of the sandbox then I'll just enable full XBAP and use browser as launch point for full blown WPF apps instead of crippled silverlight.
This is what happens when you stop innovating and start jerk-responsing to others. Silverlight should never have happened outside of core .NET ecosystem. Silverlight should have been a reduced profile of .NET instead of being a parallel-smaller-copy-thereof