Silverlight 1.1: No Love for PPC Macs
John Lam of Microsoft has written a nice blog post called “Clearing the air about Silverlight and the DLR”. In it, he confirms that the final version of Silverlight 1.1 will not support PowerPC Macs:
- 9. Silverlight V1.1 will only target Intel Mac OS X machines.
This is unfortunate but not surprising. Making .NET work on PowerPC would cost Microsoft time and money. According to this report, Apple sold 17.2 million PowerPC Macs running OS X between 2001 and 2005. Numbers for Intel Macs are a little less clear but seem to be in the 10-12 million range. Bottom line is that they’re blowing off half of the Mac installed base for the sake of their programmers’ convenience. Guess Bruce Chizen was right to question their commitment to cross-platform, huh?
On a more positive note, John Lam’s post also reveals that the new JScript implementation from Microsoft targets ECMAScript 3, which is the same version of ECMAScript supported by Flash Player. It’s great to see Microsoft doing something positive w.r.t. JavaScript/ECMAScript after ignoring it for so long (the ECMAScript 3 standard was published in 2001), even if they are just following our lead. Maybe Microsoft will even start contributing to ECMAScript 4 efforts soon…
Shebanator 
By the way, a big tip of the hat to Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link to this post. It got an amazing amount of traffic, 2 and 1/2 weeks after I originally wrote it. Just goes to show the difference between the traffic between an A-List blogger like Jon and a C-List blogger like me…
[…] Sheba Nation tell how Microsoft have shown their contempt for PowerPC Mac users by confirming that their Flash challenger, Silverfish, won’t provide support for that platform. Intel Macs are fine, but the reality is over half the installed Mac user base won’t be able to use Silverfish. […]
Blowing off Mac users « Living in a digital world said this on 25May07 at 23:55
[…] ecco la notizia brutta, non piangete: Silverlight è e sarà supportato solo dai Mac con processore PPC. Non si tratta di una tecnologia sufficientemente diffusa da considerarsi un colpo basso, ma questi […]
Microsoft Silverlight e Mac Os, vantaggi e svantaggi said this on 27May07 at 02:56
[…] Windows Media videos, so this has to be taken as good news. Unfortunately, however, Microsoft is apparently not going to support PPC Macs in future releases of Silverlight (via […]
RazorSharp iPods & Raw Gadgets » Blog Archive » Silverlight brings Windows Media Streaming from MS said this on 28May07 at 05:15
[…] We haven’t mentioned Microsoft’s entry into the web media space with its recently launched Silverlight platform, but until we stumble upon a site that actually uses it, it’s irrelevant. Tags: ActionScript, […]
Will iPhone Ever Run Flash? said this on 29Aug07 at 10:04
[…] http://push.ca/ is finially up and I just had a quick sneak peak at the videos and they looked awesome. Full screen, great quality with no hickups. The reason I only was able to have a quick peak is because I am still rocking a power PC mac and unfortunately with Silverlight 2, which PUSH is using it is not compatabile with Power PC macs. […]
Push.ca Is UP!!! : underexposed Agency said this on 29Oct08 at 12:42