I saw a post about improvements in Moonlight. Is anyone using it? Are there any issues with it? Do I need it?
Surfing seems to be going ok. The philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is one I never seem to follow. But in this case, I’d rather not add something to my hard drive that won’t add anything to my surfing experience.
Prexy wrote:
> I saw a post about improvements in Moonlight. Is anyone using it? Are
> there any issues with it? Do I need it?
No.
Yes.
No.
>
> Surfing seems to be going ok. The philosophy of “if it ain’t broke,
> don’t fix it” is one I never seem to follow. But in this case, I’d
> rather not add something to my hard drive that won’t add anything to my
> surfing experience.
Here’s the deal. Mono is a good project. Moonlight isn’t so much
Mono… it is what it is.
Silverlight wants to be Flash. Flash releases often and upgrades
happen rapidly forcing an upgrade to the client.
Mono and Moonlight development are SLOW, very slow (well… really it’s
quite fast, but not nearly the pace that Microsoft moves…).
So Mono (a .Net thing) and Moonlight will always be catching up
with (possibly) last year’s version (well… maybe not that bad, but
I don’t see them catching up… at least not for the next several
year… and then only if Microsoft falls asleep). Catching up
to Silverlight is a huge problem…
With that said, .Net, even though it will continue to evolve, the
developers using .Net can’t afford to keep going back to class…
so it will practically slow down even without Microsoft’s help.
That means that Mono as a suitable open source .Net replacement
makes good sense. In fact, since it’s the ONLY truly cross platform
and cross device .Net implementation, it might become the
preferred .Net development environment.
Moonlight? A toy at best that will likely never be able to
catch up.
Hi,
I read an article in a linux magazine about moonlight. Currently flash dominates the web world and silverlight is a competition to flash. Microsoft wants to push silverlight forward so that silverlight gets more popular and here comes moonlight into play: Because flash isn’t opensource and for creating flash applications in most cases it is necessary to buy commercial tools from adobe, moonlight offers as a free silverlight implementation the possibility to create silverlight/moonlight applications without commercial software and because of this they hope that silverlight will be used by opensource fans/developers for their web applications and silverlight will get more popular.
From this point of view I don’t think that moonlight will always be a toy I guess they will push the development more forward in the future. Moonilght 2.0 is already in development and will be published in the mid of the year.
To answer your question currently most web sites are using flash so in most common cases silverlight/moonlight is not needed. I tested moonlight because I visited a website which uses silverlight but the navigation elements were not displayed by moonlight 1.0 so that it didn’t work completely for me.
Hope this helps
I think I’ll wait until I see posts saying my life won’t be complete without moonlight. For now, I’m sitting on the sidelines.
Thanks. 