lien_meat

December 18, 2009 at 2:15pm

I mostly use linux...Ubuntu specifically.  I am all for moonlight, even though I don't believe silverlight is a decent web application platform even compared to flash, for the sole reason that it's really not very portable to anything but desktop pcs running windows or mac. I know that's nearly 99% of the desktop market...but today rich media experiences are sought after on mobile devices as well...and silverlight just isn't available on those platforms (as far as I know anyway). Moonlight aims to change that by making a open source alternative to the proprietary implementation that could the be ported to other platforms (like linux/mac phones or whatnot...)

However, the big problem presently with moonlight isn't with it's feature set compared to silverlight, it's that almost every website using silverlight I go to with the moonlight plugin will not run because of 1 or 2 reasons:
1. websites detect my OS as linux, and automatically say they don't support my platform (a wrong assumption when it comes down to it).
2. the websites detect the moonlight plugin and don't seem to know it will work the same as silverlight v2...so my platform is then said to not be supported.

Those things are going to have to change for moonlight to gain any real ground or be accepted as a usable alternative.