Moonlight Steals Spotlight From Silverlight

EddieC 0 321 Views

I laugh inside when Microsoft loses ground, even in the slightest way. It’s particularly sweet when Redmond loses to a company like Novell, which owned the LAN market it pioneered through the 1990s, only to have it ripped from its grasp by the totally inferior Windows NT. This week Novell’s Miguel de Icaza announced the first public (pre-beta) release of Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in for media streaming and running rich Internet applications. Both products would compete in the space now dominated by Adobe’s Flash Player.

In my experience, anything having to do with media playback that Microsoft touches has turned to garbage. Take Media Player. Version 2.0 is a far better utility than anything that has come along since. Media Player 10 is slow, bloated and unintuitive. Not to mention ugly. Who in their right mind would install Silverlight over Flash as their runtime for browser-based RIAs? The same people, I suppose, that now need to use IE to get all the functionality from browser apps containing ActiveX controls. But I digress.

According to Miguel’s May 13 blog post, the Moonlight release for Firefox supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux x86 and x86-64. The early release support no media codecs. Developers and contributors are invited to visit the and submit any bugs.

Microsoft released Silverlight last September, but still has not added tooling to Visual Studio, according to a Redmond Developer News story from May 12. Silverlight 2.0 is reportedly in phase 1 beta testing, and a compatible version of Moonlight is already in the works.

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A short, practical primer that fills in what happened after this thread.

The Moonlight story is more nuanced than simple “Microsoft loses ground.” ’s skepticism about Microsoft fits a lot of people’s instincts, but was right that Novell’s Mono team worked with Microsoft — Moonlight was Novell/Mono’s open‑source effort to run Silverlight content on Linux (distributed as a Firefox plugin). Early builds didn’t bundle proprietary codecs; Microsoft made a licensed media pack available and extended a patent covenant to cover Moonlight users under the collaboration. (arstechnica.com)

What followed is important context for anyone reading this years later: Moonlight never achieved full parity and the project was abandoned, and Silverlight itself faded from mainstream use. Microsoft formally ended Silverlight support on October 12, 2021. More broadly, browsers moved away from NPAPI/plugin architectures (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), which is the principal technical reason third‑party plugin projects became impractical. (en.wikipedia.org)

Practical takeaways for maintainers and devs: inventory your Silverlight apps (DRM, out‑of‑browser, managed code), then pick a migration path. Options include: migrate media to HTML5 streaming (MSE/EME + DASH/CENC), port/recompile to WebAssembly/.NET (Blazor/OpenSilver) to reuse C#/XAML, or rebuild the UI with modern JS frameworks. OpenSilver is an actively maintained WebAssembly reimplementation that targets Silverlight migrations; MDN/W3C docs explain the modern EME/MSE approach for DRM’d media. (opensilver.net)

Bottom line: ’s “Media Player 11” joke captures a version gripe, but the real shift was architectural — the plugin model lost. That’s why Moonlight, Silverlight and similar plugin remnants mostly live now as historical footnotes or as migration projects. (blog.mozilla.org)

Member Avatar for scru
scru 909 Posting Virtuoso

Quick fact - Microsoft actually partnered with Novell to push Moonlight out to the niche Linux market.

"Who in their right mind would install Silverlight over Flash as their runtime for browser-based RIAs?" you make it sound as though the two can't co-exist peacefully. As though you can't install both and be happy. To answer your question; somebody who needs use an app that was written in silverlight. They can't, after all, force their flash plugin to run it, can they?

"I laugh inside when Microsoft loses ground, even in the slightest way." - I laugh inside when people go and say things like that.

Member Avatar for jbennet
jbennet 1,618 Most Valuable Poster

Media Player 10 is slow, bloated and unintuitive

thats why media player 11 exists DUH...

Member Avatar for EddieC
EddieC 0 Posting Whiz in Training

hi jbennet- call me crazy, but after seeing Media Player 9, I've sworn off all further "improvements."

hi scru- yeah, I had seen reports of Microsoft's "cooperation," with Novell on Moonlight, but didn't give it much stock. I've found that if my default position is to distrust Monopolysoft, I'm right most of the time.

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