Adobe’s Flash Player 10 Takes on Microsoft’s Silverlight 2
The multimedia products are competing head-to-head. Adobe has the lion's share of the market, but adoption of Microsoft's Silverlight has ramped up since it launched a year ago with 150 partners, including NBCOlympics.com, Blockbuster, Yahoo Japan and AOL.
Silverlight features content protection, deep zoom, a compatible subset of Microsoft's .Net framework, and built-in controls. Silverlight also supports several programming languages, including JavaScript, Visual Basic, C# and IronPython.
"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide have access to a computer with Silverlight already installed," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president at Microsoft.
New Text Engine
Adobe's new Flash Player includes new 3-D effects, custom filters and effects, enhanced sound through audio mixing, and improved visual performance, including faster and smoother videos. The company said it has used 25 years of experience to develop its new text engine, which gives designers and developers more text-layout options and better control.
"Designers and developers know if they deliver video, online games, rich Internet applications, and other interactive experiences using Adobe Flash Player, they can reliably reach the entire Web," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the platform business unit at Adobe.
After releasing the beta version to developers, Adobe found some issues and has created fixes.
For example, in Linux, Flash Player 10 supported only browsers supported by each specific distribution of Linux. At the time the product was written, Firefox 3 was not supported by Ubuntu 7.
Another problem was with the 3-D effects. Components were not working...