Flash User

After several announcements from Microsoft about the development process of Silverlight 3 and the team behind the software, the official word came out on 10 July and Silverlight 3 was finally available on web for everyone. You can download it from Microsoft’s page
here.

Some may say that Silverlight would be the Flash killer. I sincerely doubt that and I would say it’s a long shot and time will tell. But meanwhile let’s see some of the new features that this product brings on the table:

Higher Quality Video & Audio:

Support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline. In popular terms that enables you to easily play and stream media encoded using these standards.

Empowering Richer Experiences:

- Silverlight 3 brings a new perspective 3D support, “Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3D and transitions.”

- It also comprise new bitmap API, bitmap catching, pixel shader effects, improved text rendering, animation effects and others

Rich Internet Application (RIA):

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Enables users to solve the SEO-related challenges posed by RIAs. Deeplinking (bookmarking a page with RIA) and over 60 controls with source code.

Out of Browser Capabilities:

Allows developers to design and create apps that can run on desktop, outside the browser. It has a connectivity detection, built in auto-update, it is more secure, sandboxed and comes installed with a consumer friendly non-administrator.

All in all, according to Microsoft, Silverlight 3 was designed to work on browsers like Internet Explorer 8, IE7, IE6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Safari 4 so all can download and install.