Silverlight vs. Flash

Technology

Flash and Silverlight are obviously competitors when it comes to general technology features. Both of them have the same functions and benefits as follows:

• Rich 2D animation/graphics with audio and video
• Choice of standards-based and high-performance languages
• End-to-end server and application platform
• Client side playlists for ad-insertion
• Robust video publishing tools
• High-performance, multi-core enabled lightweight client
• Data exchange with web server
• Easy installation support for platform requirements
• Tools product line integrity
• Multiple browsers support such as IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera

On the other hand, both of them have their unique features. For example, Flash has offline document support, while Silverlight has hardware-assisted editing and encoding solutions, XML-based presentation for SEO, and content access protection (DRM).

Animation manipulation

Flash is frame based, which requires users to compute the duration of an animation. For example, there are 12 frames per second in Flash animation model. If users want an object to move 5 seconds continuously, they need to calculate how many frames 5 seconds will take. Also, the player doesn't maintain any frame rate unless users embed blank audio tracks.

Instead of frame based, Silverlight supports the time based WPF animation model, which allows users to define the start and end conditions without calculating positions on various frames. Then Silverlight can generate animation process automatically.

Additionally, when create animation, the Adobe suite of products can easily share objects and files between applications such as Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. While Silverlight has these options built into it already along with several other tempting products such as ad-insertion and free streaming solutions.

Video and audio decoder

Flash supports multiple video formats with high quality codec and nice bandwidth usage, such as scalable full screen video up to HD(720p). The price of its media server licensing(unlimited bandwidth) is only one forth of that of Silverlight. But except that its Sorenson’s proprietary H.263 implementation is loosely based on a standard, Flash has no industry standard video codec yet. Also, the audio formats Flash supports are all proprietary, except for MP3 and ADPCM, whose quality of compression is not so impressive, and still requires licensing fees and third party conversion libraries.

Compare to Flash, Silverlight implements industry standard VC-1 codec for video, as well as offering support for WMV and WMA. Microsoft makes available a free Encoder SDK for producing WMA and WMV so that people are able to encode by themselves with easier integration and cheaper cost.

Binary or text file

Flash stores shapes using binary shape records. In order to write shape definitions, users need to either license a third party Flash file format SDK, or build libraries by themselves. While Silverlight uses text based XAML, which can be output using an XML object. So users don't need to buy special libraries or write their own libraries.

Flash stores fonts glyphs using the same exact shape definitions that are used for any other shape. The player does not understand TTF files, so users need to use the Win32 APIs to figure out intricacies of fonts in the Flash file format documentation by themselves. But in Silverlight, WPF/E lets users embed true type font information directly into projects, and download that information with the downloader object without doing extra work.

However, with the capability of compiling down into a binary, Flash can stream tasks to progress events during the runtime, which is more satisfying than the pure text files in Silverlight, which brings the runtime from zero to hero before one can do anything. Furthermore, Flash has plenty of functionality encapsulated in the runtime. It has its own JIT compiler, its own language ActionScript and a healthy set of controls. But Silverlight uses JavaScript as the scripting language and depends on the browser for most of the interaction processing.

Platform support

Flash integrates with multiple platforms and languages. It supports Windows, Max OS X, Linux and also moblie platforms. While Silverlight has some limitations on this aspect. It mainly supports Windows and Max OS X. But a newly developed project called Moonlight allows Linux users to see Silverlight content on the web, such as videos, and run rich Internet applications. Written with a combination of C++ and C# code, Moonlight for Linux Supports Silverlight 1.0 was first released in May, 2008.

Programming tool

Users can reuse C# classes from their tool inside exported contents. But there is no development environment for creating desktop applications which is based on ActionScript. In Flash route, users have to write all the classes and objects twice to keep pace with the tool changes. They need .NET classes to handle the author time experience and Flash classes to handle the run-time. If there are server components, users need to switch back to .NET and discard all the classes that the run time is using.

Unlike Flash that is largely built for graphic designers, Silverlight allows users to create contents with the same tools they use on a daily basis (such as Visual Studio .NET) in order to keep all the code for the server components, the authoring tool components, and the runtime/player components inside the same project.

Market

According to a survey given by Adobe System in June 2008, 99% computer users have installed Flash Player. But until then, there was still no official statistics about Silverlight given by Microsoft.

Although Silverlight has many advantages, it pales in front of Flash in terms of availability. It is not an unique Microsoft problem but a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. Because Flash is so ubiquitous that it pushed QuickTime, Real Player, and windows movie files right out of the web space. As a juvenile in market, Silverlight may need a long time to get acceptance for itself.

Conclusion

At least for the short term, Flash will continue to dominate the market because designers are more comfortable and familiar with the Adobe suite and Adobe is getting better all the time. Also, advertisement platforms are likely to run Flash advertisements because they wish people to see their advertisements without having to install new software. Another aspect is distribution, Flash currently has an in-browser installer where users don’t have to restart the browser and can refresh the web page once it’s installed. But Silverlight has a downloadable installer to let users close and then restart the browser, which is not so convenient. In order to win, Silverlight must own innovative technologies and excellent strategies to provide better design integration and easier distributed way to win over the design community. In short, it is a long term battle.