Silverlight vs Adobe Air

Question

Now with Silverlight 3 (offline, out of browser stuff), what are the main differences between the two technologies?

Answer 1

Assuming only minor changes are necessary to run a Silverlight app on the desktop, the differences are in implementation details. Silverlight is a .NET-space framework based on WPF. Flash/Flex/AIR are proprietary Adobe products based on ActionScript.

In terms of capability, they seem to be roughly equal with complementary strenghts and weaknesses. Example: SL3 will have GPU and pixel shader support. The latest Flash as Inverse Kinematics. Different strokes, etc.

Answer 2

In addition to what Dave said, Silverlight seems to be missing device support (microphone and web cam).

Answer 3

There are some significant differences right now in the Beta, no idea if these will still be differences in the release version.

1. There is no way to hide the window chrome in Silverlight OOB.
2. No ability to create a notification tray icon.
3. Air apps can be multi-window, Silverlight OOB cannot.
4. Air apps have more access to the system, Silverlight apps are sandboxed.
5. There are differences in the install and update procedures, not sure of al of the details.

Answer 4

AIR gives you access to the file system and a SQLite db. SL3 only lets you write to the file system with user interaction (a Save As dialog) and doesn't have any support for a DB in Isolated storage or on disk.

SLOOB runs in a sandbox still, so you're limited to the same cross-domain issues as a Silverlight app running in the browser.

Answer 5

It's a three way war: Adobe AIR, MS Silverlight and Mozilla Prism.

Read this blog-post and this article. A quote from the second article:

Silverlight is the clear winner in terms of power, but as one of my colleagues pointed out the other day does it matter? His point was that Flash has an incredible penetration rate. According to Adobe it’s in the 99% range. When considering rolling out a new product that requires a plug-in why introduce another barrier to adoption?

and another one from the second:

We then asked of those who answered yes which formats they use. Unsurprisingly, given how long it has been available, Flash leads with 61% of respondents. More surprising was Silverlight’s very small market share of a little over 2%, essentially the same as that of the Real format. Quicktime did surprisingly well, at just under 20%.

As for VOIP support in SL read this.

Read up on Prism here.

Answer 6

From the users standpoint I like the Silverlight installation process a lot more... Specially on the Mac - Air app installation is unnatural (to many clicks and processbars) but oneclick Silverlight install is nice :)