I am trying to develop a multimedia site and I am leaning heavily toward Silverlight however Flash is always a main player. I am a Speed and performance type developer. Which Technology will load fastest in the given scenarios? 56k, DSL and Cable?
A:
Actually, you have to assume that Flash is probably already installed on the user's browser, and SilverLight probably not. So the cost of installing silverlight (though a small download) has to be taken in to consideration as well.
Silverlight, however, does have some pretty neat out of the box multimedia support.
Vaibhav
2008-09-15 19:01:01
A:
It depends what content you're serving. If the image can be vector data and not a raster (like a .gif) then either flash or silverlight would be immensly smaller in size than the equivalent .gif.
It's hard to compare Silverlight to Flash, as it's still in beta. If you choose to use Silverlight, realize that Flash is installed on many more machines than Silverlight is, so you better have a good reason (missing feature from Flash) to use it, at this point in time.
Loren Segal
2008-09-15 19:01:21
A:
Silverlight doesn't yet have the market penetration for mission critical stuff. The big deployments of it have been mainly situations where Microsoft is trying to push market penetration by paying NBC to host Olympics content and the like.
Flash is the de facto standard for rich media sites. Animated GIFs are extremely limited and aren't likely to be a complete solution in most cases.
ceejayoz
2008-09-15 19:02:30
+3
A:
It all depends on what you're doing: animation, video, calculation, etc? There are some tests that show Silverlight being faster for raw computation, while Flash's graphics engine is farther along (GPU utilization, 3D, etc.).
If you're talking about load time, there are definitely things you can do in Silverlight to make your XAP file smaller than most images - the Hard Rock Memorabilia team got their XAP down under 70K, and that site browsed GB of photo data. I'm sure you can do the same in Flash.
While your question is focused on performance, as others have mentioned you do have to take into account the 4.5MB install for Silverlight, since it's not widely installed yet.
Jon Galloway
2008-09-15 19:05:12
Should this be the accepted answer if it doesn't address .gifs?
matt lohkamp
2008-10-03 10:18:36
+1
A:
Animater Gif's will mostly be faster than Flash/Silverlight. But Flash/Silverlight are in a different league.
WRT Flash Vs Silverlight: Based on the demo's I have seen, flash seems to be faster/less CPU intensive than silverlight. It may be because Flash has matured a lot and there is a lot of known optimization code available.