Microsoft has always left a bad taste in the mouth of web application developers because of IE’s one-offs and incompatibilities. If developers aren’t developing with Microsoft technology, they’re likely using a Mozilla or Opera based browser, and usually loath having to make web apps work in IE even though Microsoft enjoys an 80% plus web browser market share.
Having designed and develop multiple web based products, I can tell you the horror stories around developing and testing web apps for multiple browsers. Browsers general work the W3C way and then there’s the Internet Explorer way. Updates to IE delivered through Windows Automatic Updates have created new bugs and compatibility problems with products in production use by customers.
Let’s face it, the development world hasn’t exactly taken to loving ActiveX either and neither has the security community, given ActiveX and IE’s lack of concern for security. SilverLight could suffer much the same fate but it has one distinct difference. SilverLight is cross platform and cross browser.
One serious limitation I do see for SilverLight though is its reliance on Visual Studio, and Expression Studio used to design SilverLight content. Though there’s a lot of Microsoft in the world, not every developer uses .NET and development tools like Visual Studio. Content creation includes environments like Mac OS X and Linux developers.
Though Microsoft’s Expression Encoder helps bring content created by other tools into SilverLight that’s not likely to get Mac or Linux users to switch over to Windows.
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