What do you guys think of the new plugin by Microsoft that's supposed to bring productivity, interactivity, video, animation, and user interfaces to the Internet?

I just did a test run on the work comp and so far, it looks like an attempt for eye candy. It LOOKS cool, but I don't see the potential for it making the Internet experience any better. The Silverlight "experience" that I've had so far has been bogged down performance-wise but rather impressive.

Check it out for yourself by going to the Microsoft Silverlight site. I don't see anything else out there that really gives an idea of what it's like.

What's good about it is the cross-platform compatibility. In an interview about the project, the Microsoft rep showed how the whole thing worked on a Macintosh running Firefox and Safari... quite an unexpected jump for this company, in my opinion. I see how this would be very useful in merging together the use of different operating systems, computers, and even browsers to achieve the accomplishments of projects. In the demonstration, they show the use of a video editing utility (Video Expressions?) also founded by Microsoft that is compatible with the functionality of Silverlight, and the beauty of it is that a Mac user and a PC user can utilize Video Expressions to edit, view, put up, and share the same project (as Video Expressions supports Quicktime and can encode and decode between formats). There's even Linux support!

I'm really not sure what to make of the whole Silverlight project, but the cross-platform compatibility is probably a great step towards praise for Microsoft and a good argument against the past monopolization with the company's previous programs. Maybe Microsoft is turning a new leaf and might not be so bad in the future after all.

Its alright. I havent seen much improvement except it looks a little bit better.

But Microsoft is actually making their software compatible with other OS's???? Hell must have froze over. This is a very good sign for Microsoft. If they continue this way, they might become less of the worst company ever.

To sum up, not big improvement in software but a big step for Microsoft.

Define "support." Linux is missing from their downloads section. The only reference to Linux support is the one quoted in the FAQs page. Novell, the distributor and maintainer of SuSE, the ones that made a deal with Microsoft during Microsoft's patent threat (which was later called off by Microsoft), seem to be the only ones that will be able to install this program, only it'll be called "Moonlight."

I have had used Silverlight before. I just downloaded it for one simple reason: to try out the beta for microsoft mashups community. Silverlight, i have not much idea on what it is though, it was just a requirement for me in order to play with the beta services.

I was using it for some time... actually tried i can say...
but the support is not that good. Some of the sites do not get loaded at all...

Waiting for something great to happen to them...

It's a good technology to show movies, music, dedicated applications, etc, etc... But I don't think it could grow as much as the Flash, Shockwave, and the other products of Adobe.

But Microsoft always are making miracles, so we are going to expect everything

The intention that Microsoft will "support" other operating systems changes nothing. It is a market strategy and you have fallen for that - see how many people say "hey MS has changed so I will probably look into their products"?

I believe that Microsoft will gradually remove support for other OSes from time to time (when Silverlight gained monopoly), and force other OS vendors to develop and maintain their own Silverlight player of some sort. Or they will publish an ISO standard for Silverlight and extend it with proprietary APIs like crazy so that free implementations are hard to catch up, just like the .NET Framework.

And it just takes another Flash version to beat all that thing...

Well I think good things about silverlight. It seems nice to me I can say that I am following what is happening since beginning and silverlight is developing into nice product and if microsoft continues to develop it in such manner it might even become larger then flash and it shold because to me it looks mich more better. Only thing is that there are not so much tools for developing in silverlight but the thing is that they are still in the beginning.

And I'd like to point out that MIcrosoft will not remove support for other operating system because of simple thing and that is reachability they want to reach to as many customers as they can. That is the only reason why are they developing it for other operating system. And I think that they will not push it out that is they will not stop giving support to them.

Also I would like to point out that silverlight right now has many more advantages then flash itself. And the biggest advantage is that you don't need that is you don't have any need to learn new language (programming language) to program silverlight applications, vice verse with flash where you have to learn action script adn you cannot use this anywhere else. This gives silverligh huge advantage over flash. And this will only show in the future.

Now that you said it... Probably you are correct. But I am still concerned about cross-platform viewer, because MS will obviously take Windows as its top priority. But to think about it, even current Linux Flash player is not as good as the Windows one...

Seriously, we need an open source alternative for this kind of thing. Mozilla libraries (XUL etc) has the potential, and it does not introduce new programming languages (uses XML and Javascript) but a big library to learn...