Microsoft are officially supporting the Novell-sponsored implementation of the Silverlight 1.1 runtime on Linux and BSD, which means it really is a viable RIA platform.

And, I can play with it on the thing I mentioned which upset Milko and Xen!

<geekgasm>

Moonlight sounds better than Silverlight too. Hooray.

Can you say something to allay my fears of Microsoft being responsible for creating something like this that will no doubt catch on? I find it hard to imagine it not being at least a little bit riddled with security flaws: is there anything in particular that makes it safe so I don't have to worry about Micro$0ft n00bs hax0ring my debian b0x0r? :-(

flash .. working fine on macs?

It does work, but on powerpc at least, its awfully slow!

SIGSIZESWITCHER

It's .NET based, and .NET already has a well-proven security model where assemblies (that's the compiled modules) from anywhere except the local hard disks have to request various permissions to access local resources like files, the registry, ActiveX components or anything. There are more vulnerabilities in most browsers' Javascript implementations than there are likely to be in Silverlight.

On top of that, given that the .NET Framework is fully documented and the various components are open-standard (which is how MONO exists in the first place), plus the fact that Silverlight is based on XAML which can be embedded in the web-page and read like Javascript or indexed by search engines, Silverlight is probably more open than Flash/Flex and Java.

If you like, I can blather on about how the fact that it's strongly-typed and compile-time optimized mean it's going to piss all over Flash for performance, or the very real possibility that they could integrate XNA with it and create an insanely good system for completely cross-platform gaming through the web...?