Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary, programmable browser plugin for Windows and Mac. It is available for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. For Linux, Novell distributes the open source variant Moonlight with permission from Microsoft.
The goal of Silverlight is to be a direct competitor of Adobe Flash. It supports the execution of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) written on the basis of the .NET platform.
On Windows and Mac systems, Silverlight is easily installed with the system-specific installer provided at the Silverlight home page (http://www.silverlight.net/). After installing and restarting the browser, we see the plugin listed if we put about:plugins into the address bar of the Firefox browser:
The Linux open source distribution of Silverlight, called Moonlight, can be downloaded from the project home page of Moonlight (http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/). The stable version of Moonlight was 2.0 at the...