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Microsoft announces support for SWF in Silverlight Gold
Microsoft announced this morning that the Silverlight 3 player (currently codenamed "Silverlight Gold") will support playing and rendering .SWF files natively.
This casts into serious doubt the future of the flash player, which currently enjoys widespread success due to it's near-ubiquitous distribution and a complete lack of outside rivals. This could mean some big trouble for Adobe if Microsoft includes Silverlight Gold in one of its automatic updates. Microsoft could quite easily flag the flash player as a security risk and instantly ban it's automatic use on millions of PC users' systems.
As an open format, Microsoft is able to support the SWF format without worrying too much about the legal implications, much in the same way that Adobe did before it owned Macromedia. It's still likely that Adobe will file some sort of suit if it's player is flagged as a security risk, probably citing some sort of unfair invasion of privacy through the automatic updates and illegal competition.
Other features slated for inclusion in Silverlight Gold are the ability to play XBox 360 games natively on the web and a small embed-able version of the Zune player that users can use to play and share their music through their blogs, mySpace, etc.
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This sucks.
I think the user would have to be able to choose their default swf player.
I just hope coding actionscript for cross swf-player support isnt (for some odd reason) like coding html/css for cross browser support.
That would be a pain in the butt.
oh noes! Microsoft is taking over web 4.0, but it is awesome that now I get to play Halo 3 and Gears of war in internet explorer.......... hey wait a second....
Just imagine... you could rock out to Guitar Hero or Rockband from a Starbucks.
:) nice try ... !! already had a hot conversation with one of my colegs ... until saw how this article it's tagged .. and also remember the date ...
This article is incorrect. I can't find the link, but the official statement was that Silverlight was going to support Flash Player's movie delivery format. (.FLV files)
That is all they're supporting in Silverlight!
As one of my co-workers put it...
"Happy 'the internet is broken' day everyone!"
Competition is good to the market. Silverlight cant be pushed to every desktop. this would lead to anti thrust case the likes of which have never been seen. Personally Silverlight is great technology that will go nowhere. Designers are not moving any time soon.
Nice one RJ and welcome aboard to the InsideRIA team!
Just having a rant I realise the day and the tag "April Fools Day" but it could happen some day.
Flash Player and Silverlight are free products which make no money for anyone. Developing software for these rich media players is the real money-maker. If Silverlight supports .SWF it only aids the fact web developers are embracing the Flash and Flex development tools and are not developing on the proprietary Silverlight platform.
BTW Nice joke
Did you thought that maybe you guys just gave Microsoft an idea ... :P
that was really very good, reading the file of *.swf cool but what about *.flv ???
other thing , what about spaces.live ??? i can work it in my space ???
Even though this is a joke, if it did happen and Microsoft does include SWF in a automatic update I don't think that it would be that big of a problem for Adobe.
The thing that makes Flash work is the time line for animation. Microsoft is looking at the RIA side of things they are not looking at the animation and design aspect. Adobe has a strong hold for industry standard when it comes to design and implementation. Developers will have a hard time trying to build the same aspect in visual studio, which is just a IDE for app development.
... hold it, I thought Silverlight competed with Dreamweaver...?
Sigh. I hate April 1st.
@Driveby: Yup. I didn't read this till the 2nd, for instance.
April's fools jokes don't work on the internet.
@Tom
Oh I beg to differ, it worked perfectly on many commentors above :)
I'll admit, I read it on April 1 and still had a WTF moment before I realized it was a joke. But at least I got a chuckle out of it -- nice to see the InsideRIA folks have a sense of humor.
Boy do we! Huge senses of humor - so big it counts as two senses, for some of us. Expect more joking in the future, along with good quality information about the happenings of the RIA world.
I got pwned. However, I did find a video on youtube of someone running a .swf on Silverlight. So now I am confused.
LINK
Please visit http://www.pleaselearnpropergrammarbeforeikillmyself.com
Nice joke
Can Flash communicate with the Silverlight code? (e.g. through External Interface or something). This will be very beneficial in the advertising layer.