- Discovering Silverlight 4
- Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Compatibility
- Alternatives to Silverlight
- A Short History of Silverlight
- Previewing the Future of Silverlight
- Installing Silverlight 4 as a User
- Exploring Silverlight 4 Demos
- How Can You Get Involved?
- Summary
Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Compatibility
The version of Silverlight developed by Microsoft is available on a wide variety of platforms, both on the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. This plug-in will run on all these platforms with the same feature set (with one exception that we will discuss in Chapter 18, "Drag and Drop, Full Screen, Clipboard, COM Interop, Duplex Polling, Notification Windows, and Splash Screens," namely the COM integration that is of course available only on Windows operating systems).
In addition, Novell is working on a version named Moonlight, available for certain distributions of Linux. The effort by Novell is encouraged by Microsoft but is conducted independently. This is why the version releases are not necessarily coordinated, and there might be some discrepancies in the feature set, too. However, a great effort is being expended to create a plug-in that is largely compatible with the one developed by Microsoft.
Finally, we will also take a look in Chapter 15, "Developing Navigation Applications and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7" at Silverlight for the mobile platform. After announcing that they wanted to support the mobile platform, Microsoft did not communicate much and encountered a few technical difficulties that took longer than expected to solve. This year, however, we finally heard much more about support for the mobile platform, and we will take a first look at what will be available in the near future.
In short, Silverlight is your best bet if you want to run .NET-based code on a large number of platforms!
Windows and Macintosh
The following table shows in detail what is and is not possible with the plug-in implemented by Microsoft.
Table 1.1. Cross-Platform and -Browser Compatibility
OS |
IE8 |
IE7 |
IE6 |
FF3 |
Safari3 |
Safari4 |
Chrome |
Windows 7 |
Yes |
Yes |
n/a |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Windows Vista |
Yes |
Yes |
n/a |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Windows Server 2008 |
Yes |
Yes |
n/a |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Windows Server 2008 R2 |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Windows XP SP2 and SP3 |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Windows 2000 SP4 1 |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
Windows Server 2003 |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
Mac OS 10.4.8 and later (Intel based) |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Note the following restrictions:
- The Opera web browser is not officially supported at the time of this writing.
- PowerPC-based Apple computers support only Silverlight 1.0.
Linux
For Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, things are changing fast, so the best thing to do is to check the information on the Novell Moonlight website at http://www.galasoft.ch/sl4-moonlight.