Last week Microsoft introduced their answer to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash platform.  The official announcement was made at a conference of the National Association of Broadcasters. Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary platform that for video, vector graphics, and animations. Thus, web developers have a new multimedia platform to play with.

A major difference is that unlike Flash Silverlight does not output binary files. Silverlight also depends on the browser for most of the interaction processing.  Silverlight supports the WMV, WMA, and VC-1 file formats.

The Silverlight runtime is provided as a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Apple Safari. Opera was not supported in the February 2007 unofficial release but according to Microsoft implementation is being considered for the future. Obviously, for now Linux users have been left out.

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen deemed the occasion important enough to issue a statement regarding Microsoft's  new product. He, however, was skeptical that Silverlight will compete successfully with the Flash, because of platform cross-compatibility issues.

First reviews show that Silverlight integrates well with JavaScript and Ajax.  This, together with Microsoft indisputable dominance in so many spheres, will no doubt make Silverlight a technology to keep in mind.

 Microsoft Silverlight's webpage is available here.

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