Not too soon: Moonlight 2 finally reaches beta

The team of Miguel De Icaza has released the first feature complete beta release of Moonlight 2.0.

I must say: it is about time! Silverlight 3.0 for Windows has been released last month. Although I really admire the work of Miguel and his team, Linux is still the poor child when it comes to Silverlight support.

My opinion is the following: if Microsoft wants to compete with Adobe Flash they need to offer at least the same level of service as Adobe. Since Adobe releases Flash runtimes simultaneously on Windows, Mac and Linux, the minimum that Microsoft needs to offer to be credible is the same simultaneous release schedule. This is obviously still not the case!

The only silver lining that I see here is that contrary to Flash, Moonlight is open source. This may allow the runtime to be easily ported to other computing platforms such as ARM. Also it is possible to replace the video decoders provided by Microsoft by your own if you compile Moonlight yourself. This means that someone could create a version of Moonlight that takes advantage of video decoding acceleration protocols, like Nvidia VDPAU.

That said, the delay between Windows and Linux version releases is still too much of an issue for me to accept Moonlight / Silverlight as a credible alternative to Flash. If Microsoft was serious about competing with Adobe these delays would not exists. As it is now Silverlight looks more like a attempt by Microsoft to draw the developers attention away from Flash than to create a true multi-platform runtime.

I do think that if Microsoft really wanted they could make a success out of Silverlight, but that would require them to stop favoring their own platforms and become really agnostic: support all desktop and most mobile operating system, as well as most consoles! Granted, they support the Mac, but Macs only compete with Windows in the high end consumer computing segment. Where is Silverlight for the Wii browser? What about the PS3s? What about Symbian and Android smartphones? What about the iPhone, are they even working on it? As long as Microsoft does not solve these issues Silverlight will stay an also-ran.