Slightly ajar

Things are hotting up in the rich media arms race. In the red corner we have Adobe, with Apollo (web technologies, Flash and Flex), while in the blue corner we have the new entrant from the Redmond Giant, Silverlight (web technologies, XAML, .Net et al) — wow, these names really do sound like American Wrestlers. The W3C is also somewhere there in the mix with SVG and widgets 1.0. it could potentially be a bloody battle, and it is quite worrying for the web, as each of the two main players use their own propitiatory technologies, runtimes, codecs and developer tools. One has to use Visual Studio, or Expression studio on Windows to develop for Silverlight for example. Is this another example of the big guys trying to take control of the web again. After Mix, Ex-Microsoft Employee, Robert Scoble, posted about Silverlight, claiming Microsoft rebooted the web.

As Silverlight runs in a browser, it is very important that Opera supports it. We must be compatible with the web sites out there that will use this technology. I also think that it is important that Adobe have strong competition, so that it doesn't run away with a monopoly on rich media interfaces on the web, tying everyone to their own technologies and products. Silverlight has also already been demoed on Windows Mobile. Maybe this is the kick that Adobe needs to start pushing its development of Flash on mobiles and embedded devices. If Flash isn't there (or gets too outdated) maybe Microsoft will get there first.

I don't want to announce too much just yet, but as can be seen from this picture, there are plans in the works for Opera support. We've been discussing this with Microsoft and Tim Sneath since it was still called WFP/e. I hoped to be at Mix to announce Opera support, but unfortunately it came a bit too soon. It was good to see that CNet picked up Forest Key's announcement though. Progress and bug fixes are being made, and the Silverlight team have been very helpful. Hopefully we'll be able to make announcement on Opera compatibility soon.

It is not just the Silverlight team that are being helpful. Microsoft's Ajax library, ASP.net Ajax, has issues in our browser. We've started to look into how we can fix these problems, and have just started discussing with them on including their automated test suite into our build system. We can then start looking into fixing the problems on both their and our end. Once ASP.net Ajax is fully compatible, we should see a vast reduction in the problems in their services that make use of the library, such as the Live.com series.