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Mozilla, Adobe and Silverlight. Shall we dance?

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No doubt you've seen the Prism announcement by Mozilla. Quite an interesting move in this chess game we call "The Software Industry". Personally, I'm not sure what the end game for Mozilla is anymore and I'm sure If I look hard enough I'll find that answer.

Mike Chambers at Adobe put up a post essentially stating why he thinks AIR isn't being treated fairly by the Mozilla folks (welcome to the "my competitor takes shots at me" party ). I get his point(s), but I was surprised to see him say this:

"...Maybe we need to do a better job of getting that info out there, but I would expect (and suspect) that someone working on a similar project would know that..." - Mike Chambers.

Surprised simply because it illustrates for me that AIR as a concept has many hurdles ahead of it, and not only do I disagree with it's "approach" to the market, but now that it has a competitor that's non-Microsoft, it's yet another battlefront they will have to face and a unified messaging front is overdue.

To put into perspective, Adobe needs to approach their competitors differently, and Mike's latest blog post didn't do him any favors (I understood his points, I in part agreed with him, but never ever pick a fight with Mozilla crowd as that product as emotional bonds associated to it, and you will lose - except if you're this guy). I think competition in this space is really going to push us all that much faster in terms of doing better online and to me the web tomorrow is going to exceed my expectations of today.

I agree with Mike on this comment:

"..Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web..." - Mozilla

hmm, seems like the same execution model as both Microsoft and Adobe, only the boundaries have slightly shifted. "Not a runtime, but the agent that houses in the runtime" to which I ask you these days in our RIA world.. which is the agent and which is the runtime. Silverlight and AIR are separate, but that's been said before and yet people continue to link them together. That interests me as is it a case of "they want Silverlight to have desktop functionality" or is it a case of "no idea, but they are both x-platform so it makes sense to marry the two".

Interesting..

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2007
    PingBack from http://800notes.aribwk.com/uncategorized/mozilla-adobe-and-silverlight-shall-we-dance

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    Isn't "interesting" the most over-used cliche at the minute at Microsoft? Interesting

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    Just be thankful i didn't use "Super Excited" :)

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    I don't understand your confusion about the difference between this and what MS and Adobe are doing. MS says "Write a web application using Silverlight and you can get desktop integration". Adobe says "Write a web application using AIR and you can get desktop integration". Mozilla says "write a website without doing anything special, and we will take care of desktop integration". To use an application targeted at Silverlight, the user needs Silverlight installed. To use an application targeted at AIR, the user needs AIR installed. You can use the same application that Prism targets on a machine with no Mozilla software on it at all, because the website will run perfectly well on IE or Safari.

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    You're being sarcastic but that IS exactly the genius of it. It's a web browser with a novel UI. In a situation like this where the whole benefit comes from network effects, which of these models has more chance of succeeding? A: We require developers to target the SilverXBFlAIR platform; in order to do so, users must install the SilverXBFlAIR platform. But users only benefit from installing the platform to the extent that developers target it. Chicken, meet egg. or B: Users who install the platform can apply it to any website and gain all the benefits without the developers having to do a thing. Note that this analysis still applies even if Mozilla DOES in future provide some custom APIs to do things specific to the Prism environment. As a developer you can then write a small amount of code to make the experience within Prism better (if you find that you have lots of Prism users), but users who don't have Prism still share 99% of the code. Note that I have no idea whether Mozilla plans to do this; my guess would be that they might, but that they'd attempt to do so in a way that the APIs are standardizable and encourage other browsers to implement them too to the extent that they make sense within the other browsers' UIs. Mozilla doesn't and never has wanted 100% market share. They want standards compliant browsers to have 100% market share, because this benefits users, but they'd consider a 25%/25%/25%/25% Firefox/Opera/Safari/IE8 (if IE8 ever gets released and is actually standards compliant) a complete and unmitigated success. Even though that would mean their OWN share was DOWN from today.

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    "Write to your hard drive via JavaScript bridge" is a hypothetical that has a close enough parallel with reality that I can answer it. Mozilla is working with WHATWG along with... well, every other browser vendor except Microsoft... to standardize things like local storage and canvas that make for richer user experiences. Microsoft is more than welcome to join that effort as an equal player - in fact I think I can say with full confidence that everyone involved wishes they would. Mozilla has no plans to adopt Mozilla-specific extensions; they aggressively push everything they do into standards, and aggressively seek input from other browser vendors to aid the standardization effort and get the resulting standards implemented. (By the way, I never bought the "bundling is evil" argument. Please DO bundle Silverlight with the OS; for that matter, I wish you'd push .NET more aggressively via windows update and office, and I wish it weren't possible to have a Windows machine with IE6 still the primary browser. I know you get a lot of grief for stuff like this; I think it's unmerited. Netscape lost the browser wars all by itself; Microsoft competed better. No foul there)

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2007
    Stuart Ballard: I was writing a blog post about all this when I read your comments. very interesting^W^W Super exciting ;-) http://standblog.org/blog/post/2007/10/29/The-not-so-hidden-goals-of-Prism-AIR-and-Silverlight PS: too bad the links to specific comments are not working here...

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2008
    At present the installation for Silverlight involves saving a file to your hard disk and re-starting your browser.  Both of these steps are major barriers to the adoption of the plug-in. When are these (basic) issues going to be fixed?