Microsoft Releases Moonlight Beta 1, Silverlight for Linux
Late November we were announcing that Microsoft and Novel are working in partnership so as to develop a software product that would be the equivalent of Adobe Flash and Silverlight 2, just that it would work on the Linux OS. As of this week Moonlight Beta 1 has been made available to the public – which is great news because it has been over a year since a new version of Moonlight has dropped.
According to Christophe Lauer, technical specialist for Windows Live web development technologies, Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 will work on several Linux based operating systems, including Fedora Core 9, Ubuntu 8.04, and openSUSE 11 – both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This first beta installment will work with both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0
“To us it's more a matter of making sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the Web. It's not a [question of whether] we like Flash more than Silverlight. We wanted to make sure that Linux users wouldn't be left out from any interesting Web content,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of platform development with Novell and Moonlight project leader.
With Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, the development team has addressed the Microsoft Media Pack support issues, made some improvements to animation, media and rendering, plugged some memory leaks and solved the performance issues associated with blacklisted binary drivers. If during your testing you happen to stumble across any bugs or problems in the software application, you are very well advised to let Microsoft in on the problem. You can do so here.
In related news, Microsoft has announced that it plans to continue the development process of its Silverlight 2 application which was launched back in October. In 2009 the Redmond software manufacturing giant plans to have Silverlight 3 all ready for its public release. Microsoft is committed to coming up with a very competitive product and consequently is asking Silverlight users to take a survey so as to figure out which aspects of Silverlight need working on and even which new features to implement in the upcoming Silverlight 3.
If you would like to get Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, a download location is available here.
According to Christophe Lauer, technical specialist for Windows Live web development technologies, Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 will work on several Linux based operating systems, including Fedora Core 9, Ubuntu 8.04, and openSUSE 11 – both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This first beta installment will work with both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0
“To us it's more a matter of making sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the Web. It's not a [question of whether] we like Flash more than Silverlight. We wanted to make sure that Linux users wouldn't be left out from any interesting Web content,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of platform development with Novell and Moonlight project leader.
With Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, the development team has addressed the Microsoft Media Pack support issues, made some improvements to animation, media and rendering, plugged some memory leaks and solved the performance issues associated with blacklisted binary drivers. If during your testing you happen to stumble across any bugs or problems in the software application, you are very well advised to let Microsoft in on the problem. You can do so here.
In related news, Microsoft has announced that it plans to continue the development process of its Silverlight 2 application which was launched back in October. In 2009 the Redmond software manufacturing giant plans to have Silverlight 3 all ready for its public release. Microsoft is committed to coming up with a very competitive product and consequently is asking Silverlight users to take a survey so as to figure out which aspects of Silverlight need working on and even which new features to implement in the upcoming Silverlight 3.
If you would like to get Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, a download location is available here.
