This post on Silverlight vs. Flash was written by someone who is far more knowledgeable than I and presents an opposing view to James’ post entitled “Silverlight? Leave Flash to the experts…”.  Something that bothers me though, is that there are many posts about how this is a Flash vs Silverlight or Adobe vs Microsoft thing.  I don’t see it like that at all.  The fact that Adobe's only serious competitor in this space has come out with a product to do essentially the same thing just shows you how mature this industry is getting. Surely that can only be a good thing for Flash developers.

There have been flash apps on web sites for years, but nobody was really bothered by them.  More to the point, sites with heavy flash content were considered bloated and too slow in a world that predominately connected with modems.  Why should I use the “rich” content view when I’m restricted to a 56k modem, and just want to get to the pertinent information?  Things are changing though.  Connectivity speeds are now on average much higher than before, and we can (and do) look seriously at producing heavy content for pages. I recently started looking again into a more graphical interface for this site, mainly because I just don’t know anyone who uses a modem these days.  I’m not averse to actually having my site built in Flash either – I care more these days about how it looks than the technology behind the site, provided these is mass-adoption of that technology.

Flash is pretty much a standard these days.  Its the first plugin you get for your browser, and sometimes the last.  Everybody uses it. In the last 3,401 visits to my web site, only a maximum of 68 (2%) potentially didn’t have flash installed (meaning it wasn’t installed, or it wasn’t a recognised version).  Now, provided a fallback is provided, I see no reason why I shouldn’t provide a richer experience to my readers.  That in turn translates into potential business for a flash developer, should I chose to go down that route.  I can debug flash and actionscript , but I’m pretty crap at creating it from scratch.

Now, if there was an alternative wouldn’t that create more competition?  Wouldn’t it motivate Adobe to come out with something better than they have now, and wouldn’t the be a repeating cycle? To quote Jesse Ezell who really knows Flash : “So, Flash is great. Silverlight just solves a lot of the major problems that I've run into with Flash”.  Jesse created an open API called SwfSource, which was a huge bug-fixed, properly documented, working version of Flash 4.  After he released it, and Macromedia were seeing posts on their message boards about this SDK as opposed to their own.  They killed the project and dropped the openness of the product.  This time around however, they may have to react.  They won’t be able to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist.  Silverlight is a Microsoft product, and I would guess that Adobe are paying attention to that.  Even more so in consideration of Microsoft’s previous experiences in other markets.

So, Flash or Silverlight?  It really doesn’t matter, provided I get to have the best experience I can get on the web.

Jims Blog | Silverlight? Leave Flash to the Experts...