I’m an ardent Firefox user – have been for years and despite all the developments in other browsers on the market, Firefox still provides me with everything that I need, and none of the other browsers come close.
Still, every once in a while I’ll spend a bit of time in Chrome or Opera – usually when I’m working on music and don’t want to open my last Firefox session which, inevitably, will consist of about 20 tabs.
Today was one of those cases where I found myself using Chrome to check my feeds and I noticed a post about Microsoft giving away copies of their web development tools. I headed over to the MS site and lo and behold I could not watch any of the demo videos due to a lack of Microsoft’s Silverlight product – a bit of a competitor to Adobe’s Flash.
I tried to install Silverlight and what message do I get but:
Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer’s hardware or operating system.
This Web browser or operating system may not be compatible with Silverlight. Please review the system requirements and, if you wish to proceed, choose the link for your operating system.
Even better is that they include a table of compatibility that doesn’t even acknowledge Chrome (not to mention Opera):
Silverlight Compatibility List
I wonder is that an intentional dig at Chrome? That wouldn’t really make sense if Microsoft want to push Silverlight as a real alternative to Flash.
Strangely, one of the Silverlight developers blogged about hacking the detection scripts to allow installation for Chrome. This was back in February and yet they still haven’t sorted out support nearly 8 months and 2 versions later. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me at all.
Anyway, the result was that I quickly stopped bothering to look at the MS web developer site.
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