Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

The headline is sensationalist and wrong. Think of it this way, Metro is their tablet/iPad mode. The iPad has no flash/silverlight in the browser, and neither does Metro IE. This in order to get the best tablet experience, battery life etc. The difference is, you can hit a button and open up full Windows desktop mode and get the full browsing experience, while accepting a tradeoff in battery life.<p>They aren't abandoning it, they're just optimizing for the use case. In fact, Silverlight developers should be happy - with some simple namespace changes, they demonstrated converting a silverlight program to a Metro UI on stage in the keynote. Sure your program may not run in the browser unless they swap to full desktop mode, but it will be easy for you to make it a proper installed application if you desire.<p>It's a good decision in my book, and will result in a better tablet experience. Frankly all the misinformation and hyperbole around this is getting exhausting. They've really not pulled the rug from under anyone at all.

A question for those of you who work with Microsoft frameworks. Why do you believe in <i>any</i> technology that MS gives you? How is it these people have any credibility left?<p>Their technologies are invariably doomed to obsolesence within about 2-3 years of their introduction. Those that the web doesn't make obsolete are eventually thrown under the bus by Microsoft themselves in about the same time frame.

The title is nonsense, here is the microsoft blog post:<p><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-browsing-and-plug-in-free-html5.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-br...</a>

I am glad that they are ditching all of the pluggins, but sad that they are settling on javascript as their primary language.<p>I know that the Hacker News community is very pro-javascript for the most part, so I expect to be down-voted.<p>But at the very least, I think javascript could benefit from more competition.<p>I remember when Microsoft was the company that made standards, now they seem be playing catch-up with the rest of the industry.<p>What I really would have loved to see them do is completely reinvent the browser from the ground up. Support javascript and html 5 as "legacy" but create a new, effective, and fast language for applications and rendering.<p>Web browsers are still stuck in document mode. We don't see anything wrong with this, but links and back buttons are not the best way to control application state. We have moved beyond documents and primarily create applications these days (even if they are document-hosting applications like blogs). Imagine if Photoshop was controlled using links and back buttons. I know that javascript is capable of more advanced, realtime techniques, but most websites are stilled laid out in the page by page format these days. On top of it all, even V8 javascript still runs 10-20x slower than C.

Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is nuts with the whole Metro UI on a PC thing?<p>I mean it may be a good UI for tablets, but I did not buy two 24" widescreen monitors to run IE in fullscreen. When I use my PC I don't care about active tiles or what's the desktop at all. I have apps to run and work to do.<p>And I am not about to replace my mouse &#38; keyboard with touchscreen on the desktop anytime soon (if ever).<p>Simply put tablets and PCs are not the same thing and are not used in for the same purpose. They need different GUIs.

Putting the focus on Silverlight is an oddly parochial angle, when Silverlight has so little significance in comparison with Flash.<p>This move is far more interesting, surely, as confirmation that Flash has lost the browser wars and that web standards will determine the future of web applications.<p>If you make a living as a Flash developer, it's long past time to start learning about the web.

Microsoft has been losing its Windows franchise since two key events:<p>1. Netscape introducing navigator<p>2. Microsoft stopping development post IE6<p>This has actually given the web browsers a modicum of stability and people were able to develop against a stable medium, and allowed Firefox to catch up in terms of compatibility.<p>In order to regain its Windows franchise, it needs to reimpose the Windows tax.<p>Firstly, by making Metro IE10 plugin-less, it kills Adobe Flash as a navigator-pretender.<p>Secondly, by introducing a lot of IE10 specific extensions, it hopes that developers will start to make use of these, eventually leading to the balkanization of the web, with MS having the highest share of desktops, it hopes it can buy another 20 years of windows tax.<p>Thirdly, Apple's experience has shown that without plugins, developers will either have to choose between HTML or Apps. Now Apps are a great way to create lock in. The existence of plugins threatens that.

<i>But today, right now, HTML5 is not appropriate for the immersive applications that Flash and Silverlight are capable of creating.</i><p>You could argue that Flash and Silverlight were never particularly appropriate either. Cue native apps...

A side note: the typos, misspelling, tortured wording and grammatical errors make this article particularly painful to read. I first thought that it's an automatic translation. If you are a tech writer, take a minimum care of these things, and you will attract readers instead of repelling them.

No Google Chrome-in-IE either then.<p>I should probably be paying attention to this, but is Metro HTML5/js only? Does that mean Chrome and Firefox are basically dead on Windows 8 (unless you leave Metro)? And what about anti-trust lawsuits against IE??

That's a bit baffling. It seems like there are at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of people who play flash games every day (Zynga being rather happy about that). They may not be power users but they are everyday consumers. A lot of that isn't going to be casually rewritten into HTML/JS.

Title should be: IE10 preview doesn't support plugins. Silverlight still exists in desktop mode IE10, and every other OS/browser configuration that's currently supported, plus windows phone, xbox, and desktop silverlight apps. (Though it would be nice if IE10 continues to not support plugins-- that would seriously accelerate the push to native web development).

Microsoft abandons silverlight, Sony announces Playstation Suite SDK written in C#. This is topsy-turvy day.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999086" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999086</a>

The author's claim seems to be simply false; his post explicitly says (quoting Sinofsky):<p>"In Windows 8, IE 10 is available as a Metro style app and as a desktop app. The desktop app continues to fully support <i>all plug-ins and extensions</i>." (emphasis mine)

If Microsoft is all-in on JavaScript on the web and desktop, I guess that Google will have a <i>very</i> hard time convincing them to switch to Dart instead.

It wasn't necesarily a bad idea to compete with Flash, but SilverLight was about 10 years too late and offered no reason for the entire world to switch from Flash.<p>Thus, the end of SilverLight was just a question of 'when', not 'if'.

Hm, plugins have other uses than just displaying legacy data formats. I want to be able to enhance the web sites I regularly visit. OK, and filter ads while I am at it.

Is this true? From the article: "The Metro-style browser in Windows 8 does not support plugins: This means no Flash, no QuickTime, no PDF readers, and no Silverlight. The companies that use Flash or Silverlight to augment their websites are going to have the most trouble. Since they cannot simply port their code to Metro they will need to need go rewrite the components from scratch using HTML and JavaScript."

All this consternation and speculation (and general negativeness) about a completely alpha stage product is why Apple does not show their products (much) before release.<p>Think about it. Now if you are Microsoft, you have to decide whether your vision is good or if you should "listen" to what the market is telling you and shift your strategy. Glad I don't have to make that decision.

It would be nice if Microsoft provided a non-silverlight interface to the Feynman lectures that they have the rights to: <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/escience/archive/2009/07/15/project-tuva-richard-feynman-is-now-available-to-all.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/escience/archive/2009/07/15/project-...</a>

I have invested a lot of time into sivlerlight app. I think the best possible outcome is that Windows 8 Metro will support silverlight natively and silverlight apps will be sold in the app store. I always thought of silverlight as a stalking horse to get people hooked on XAML and C# anyway.

But if they are giving up Flash....does that mean they will start using WebM in IE10?

Even if Metro does not allow Silverlight plugins, it is still using WinRT, which is using XAML UIs and more importantly developers can use C# to write apps against it. So the knowledge isn't entirely lost, it's just transferred.

It should be noted before the usual MS flames roll in that Silverlight is an umbrella product name for the underlying technologies. The same underlying technologies that encompass WPF and Metro.<p>You'll still be using the same XAML/C#/etc

Is Metro UI only for tablets? I was under the impression that was going to be the default desktop UI too. In what mode will desktop IE run by default?

Is Netflix in-browser streaming still dependent on Silverlight?

How much money did Microsoft sink into Silverlight?

Steve Jobs once said that Apple and Microsoft are 100% of the PC market and if they agree on something it becomes a standard. These days we need to consider Google too. Anyway, it looks like HTML5 just became the "official" standard.