Flash Vs Silverlight

Today everyone who uses Internet is familiar with these two terminologies, thanks to the recent evolution in web development. Both of the tools produce spectacular affects and give a new life to the world of web development. With the release of Silverlight 1.0 and its subsequent versions, a debate started among designers and developers regarding choosing between Flash and Silverlight. Silverlight faces difficulties in capturing the market because of the maturity of Flash. However, Silverlight has managed to keep up by including certain features that designers and developers have always wanted to see in Flash, such as search engine optimization. In this article, we will discuss some of the technical differences between Flash and Silverlight to help you choose the technology that best suits your needs.

Formerly known as Macromedia Flash and now relabeled as Adobe Flash, flash is streaming animation for WebPages. Sometimes Flash is a portion of an html web page, and sometimes a web page is made entirely of Flash. Either way, Flash files are called "Flash movies".

These are special .swf format files that beam to your web browser screen as you watch them. This highly interactive tool is frequently used for advertisements and games. More recently, it has been positioned as a tool for "Rich Internet Applications" ("RIAs"). Flash manipulates vector and raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera. Flash contains an Object-oriented language called Action Script.

Flash content may be displayed on various computer systems and devices, using Adobe Flash Player, which is available free for common Web browsers, some mobile phones and a few other electronic devices (using Flash Lite). Flash can be used to create interactive rich media content (including text, photos, music, video, vector graphics, voiceover, and a wide variety of motion graphic effects and animation) to be displayed in a browser. By producing a compiled flash movie and an html page which embeds that movie and uploading both to a web server, the content is made viewable to a site visitor via a Flash browser plugin. Flash can also be used to create executable files, to be played from a CD or from the desktop of either a PC or a Mac, without requiring any additional software (the Flash player is embedded in the executable).

A Flash source file is also referred to as a Flash movie, whether it is actually an ad, a cartoon, a complete web site, a game, or some other Flash application. Flash is an ideal application, not only for entertaining or making a statement on a website, but for any online application involving user interaction, display of database content, need for resizable graphics, maps, explanatory animation, custom navigation, or seamless/custom integration of video or sound. The software is ubiquitous on the Web, both because of its speed (vector-based animations, which can adapt to different display sizes and resolutions, play as they download) and for the smooth way it renders graphics. Flash files, unlike animated but rasterized GIF and JPEG, are compact, efficient, and designed for optimized delivery.

Known as a do-it-yourself animation package, Flash 4 gives Web designers the ability to import artwork using whatever bitmap or illustration tool they prefer, and to create animation and special effects, and add sound and interactivity. The content is then saved as file with a .SWF file name extension (the letters SWF stand for 'Shockwave Flash.').

Web users with Intel Pentium or Power Macintosh processors can download Flash Player to view Flash content, which performs across multiple browsers and platforms. Flash is lauded for being one of the Web's most accessible plug-in. According to an independent study cited by Macromedia, 89.9 percent of Web users already have Flash Player installed. Until the advent of HTML5, displaying video on a web page required browser plugins, which are uniquely implemented by third party vendors.

Virtually all browser plugins for video are free and cross-platform, including Adobe's offering of Flash Video, which was first introduced with Flash version 6. Flash Video has been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash. In 2010, Apple has publicly criticized Adobe's implementation of Flash Video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration, as well as criticizing Flash technology in general which has been cited as reason for not implementing Apple's mobile devices. Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which takes advantage of hardware acceleration even on a Mac.

Flash as a format has become widespread on the desktop market; one estimate is that 95% of PCs have it, while Adobe claims that 98 percent of U.S. Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have installed the Flash Player, with 92 to 95% (depending on region) having the latest version.] Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.

The Adobe Flash Player exists for a variety of systems and devices: Windows, Mac OS 9/X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC/Windows CE, OS/2, QNX, Symbian, Palm OS, BeOS, and IRIX, although the performance is typically best on Windows (see Performance). For compatibility with devices (embedded systems), see Macromedia Flash Lite.

Among mobile devices, Flash has less penetration because Apple does not bundle or allow third-party runtimes on its iPhone, which accounts for more than 60% of global smartphone web traffic, or the iPod touch, which makes up more than 95% of "mobile Internet device" traffic. This hurts Adobe's ability to market Flash as a ubiquitous mobile platform. However, Flash support has been announced for competing mobile platforms, including the next version of Android.

Flash Vs Silverlight