Moonlight vs Flash - on Linux Support

Microsoft Silverlight is the biggest competitor of Adobe Flash. One of the biggest advantages of Flash over Silverlight was its Linux support. But things are getting changed now. The Moonlight is the open source project that tries to implement MS Silverlight on Linux. Even though Moonlight doesn't provide a full support of Silverlight, however, it's been doing a great job on that recently.

I always had to switch back to Windows to watch my favorite club games which was broadcasted only on Silverlight. I had moonlight plugin installed on Firefox, but for some reason it didn't show anything. Today I just went to that website on Firefox and noticed it was asking me to install a new plugin for it. I installed the new Moonlight plugin for Firefox and all of a sudden I was able to watch my game on my Arch Linux which means I don't need to switch to Windows anymore.

You can watch Flash videos on Linux, too. But the reason I am very disappointed with them is their lack of support for 64 bit architectures on their newest products. They stopped developing Flash for Linux on 64 bit architectures a while ago, which left 64 bit Linux users with an insecure Flash installed on their computers that freezes on full screen mode occasionally.

The good news about Flash I found out today, is that they have developed a new Flash player for 64 bit architectures for all operating systems called Square. I really hope it does a good job, because Moonlight still requires EULA for Audio codecs.

With Adobe providing better support for 64 bit architecture and Silverlight providing better support for Linux, we have to see a healthy competition in future between two of them. However, if Moonlight really wants to compete with Adobe, they have to get rid of the EULA ASAP.

Published On: Sept. 17, 2010 --- Views: 1141

Tags: silverlight mono moonlight flash

---

There are 0 comment(s):

---

Back To The Blog Page