Silverlight's official launch

A couple weeks ago I tried to install Silverlight in Opera to no avail. Little did I know that the official launch hadn't occured yet. I see that today was the Official launch of Silverlight from Microsoft. The cool news is that there are plans for a linux version of Silverlight. The bad news, it still doesn't work in Opera. ...

Okay, so by cross browser compatible they mean that there is support for the main browsers that compete with them on Mac and PC. The ( currently ) tertiary competitor still doesn't work, let alone have support.

Thinking this might have been a version thing I tried to install it in the Alpha version of Opera 9.5, codenamed Kestrel. Faster browser :), same results.

Beyond the world of creating rich internet applications for work I am also an avid wrestling fan. I have constantly thought on the idea of a flash/flex based player for the WWE pay-per-views and weekly programming. Low and behold, the silverlight page has WWE right there as one of the examples. I obviously couldn't check it out in Opera so I had to hit my view in firefox button and check out WWE's silverlight launch page. Honestly, I saw this coming. Hopefully it will work better than having to watch a pay per view in the Windows Media Player ( upgrading if you haven't in a long time and missing hours of the show to technical issues :irked: ).

It will be interesting to see what happens with Silverlight. With Microsoft, it obviously has a whole lot of weight behind it. Do we really need another entrant into the field of rich media/rich application development? Will this crush flash( which works fine in Opera )? I'm amazed at some of the people putting their large eggs into the Silverlight basket. That will make a big difference in the short term.