Now here is a question thats been bugging me for a few months now:

What is this silverlight that microsoft are pushing? (and they seem to be pushing hard!)

Curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I did some research.

In a nutshell: its a competitor to adobe flash (and also java, quicktime, etc).

So the next question is: should I bother installing it?

The answer (for the moment) seems to be: no

It seems that there are very few websites out there that actually use silverlight.

And on top of that, there seems to be many questions about microsofts intentions with this product.

MS say silverlight is client and server agnostic. They say it will run on both windows and Mac systems.

Hold on: what about linux?

Most websites out there run linux…

wikipedia have a long technical description about it, but I find the criticism section near the bottom of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight to be the most interesting.

Looks like another attempt to get a stranglehold on the internet (to me, it seems similar to the initial release of MSN… where MS were wanting people to pay extra to access microsofts version of the internet (with extra content that you couldn’t get on the “normal” internet). At that stage, they had absolutely no idea what the internet was really about… I wonder if anything has changed?