Web And Say All we have to say about the Web

Microsoft is honest in the recent blog post about using one platform to build another by saying that "some people have gone as far as to suggest HTML 5 could eliminate the need for Flash and Silverlight". Yes, we do want to go that far and we don't want Flash or Silverlight addons / plugins (call them however you like) in our fully capable, HTML 5 compliant web browser! I mean, why should we want them if Canvas is perfectly capable of achieving the same task ? Well, one of the answer is due to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer: as of version 8, it still doesn't support the Canvas element. And Microsoft's solution is pretty funny: we don't support the Canvas element but look, our own Silverlight can do it. There is no way you won't install Silverlight now, right ? Wrong !

A little more than a year after its first release, Microsoft today announces the immediate availability of the second version of its Silverlight plugin. Silverlight 2 is a programmable web browser and mobile phone plugin whose main goal is to compete with Adobe's Flash in vector graphics, animation, online video streaming... and many other "rich" user-experience tasks. And it seems to be working as Silverlight is now available for a quarter of the consumers worldwide, according to Yahoo's article.