Silverlight Install Base - How big is it?

Question

Silverlight v2.0 is getting closer and closer to RTM but I have yet to hear any stats as to how many browsers are running Silverlight. If I ask Adobe (by googling "Flash install base") they're only too happy to tell me that 97.7% of browsers are running Flash player 9 or better.

Not that I believe everything I read, but where are these statistics from Microsoft or some other vendor about Silverlight? I'm going to be making a technology choice soon and a little bit of empirical evidence would be an asset at this point...

All you Silverlight developers out there, show me your stats!

Answer 1

Quick Answer: www.riastats.com

This site compares the different RIA plugins using graphical charts and graphs.

It gets its data from small snippets of javascripts running on sites accross the web (approx 400,000 last time I looked)

At the time of this post, Silverlight 2 was sitting at close to 11%.

I would not take this as the end-all, be-all in RIA stats, but it's the best site I've found so far.

Answer 2

If you are developing something for a general audience, I would highly recommend against Silverlight as you immediately cut out Linux users.

I went to watch videos for the Olympics (and I run exclusively Linux), and I couldn't watch the video on their site because they were in Silverlight. On top of that, they actively removed all videos from YouTube, so I had no alternative but to try and scrounge up a Windows boot. This only served to give me a very negative opinion of NBC, and consider them quite amateurish to pick such a restricting technology for something that should be available for everyone.

While Flash has it's problems, it works fine in Linux, so I would say (at this point), it is a much superior technology choice.

If you KNOW your audience is entirely on Windows (maybe Mac).... then you can consider Silverlight with knowing you won't be cutting out part of your audience.

Answer 3

if you're that concerned about locking out potential users, you should be building a low-bandwidth HTML only version of your site anyways...regardless of whether you use Flash or Silverlight.

Answer 4

I struggled with this for a while. Ultimately, I chose to develop my site using Silverlight for the major components. I did a good bit of research, and I reached the following bottom-line conclusion:

If Silverlight fails, it will not be for lack of installed base. There are simply too many levers for MS to pull (windows update, embedding it in IE8, or even paying highly trafficed sites to use it.

I will add this from Alexa - microsoft.com has pretty impressive daily reach and it uses SL on the main page. I would also not be surprised at all if Outlook Web Access is moved to Silverlight - thereby turning every single office outlook user who wants to access email from home/other into a roaming SL installer.

Alexa Link comparing microsoft.com/ebay.com/amazon.com

I will add this from ScottGu's blog entry:

In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV), the Netherlands (by NOS), Russia (by Sportbox.ru) and Italy (by RAI). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers.

Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight.