ReadWriteWeb

Last week Microsoft issued a blog post stating that Internet Explorer will not support WebGL because WebGL is inherently insecure. The post was based on research conducted by the firm Context, which showed that WebGL could be used for denial of service attacks or use the GPU to run malicious code. Microsoft complained that WebGL is too reliant on third parties (ie, GPU vendors) to secure the Web experience.

The only problem, according to Chrome developer Gregg Tavares (not speaking on behalf of Google), is that Silverlight 5 has the exact same vulnerability. Microsoft says it has fixed the vulnerability and the fix will appear in the next beta release.

Last week Microsoft officially announced the next version of its operating system, currently codenamed Windows 8. We took a look at many of the features here. The announcement has generated a lot of buzz, but also a lot of uncertainty. How will support for legacy applications be handled? Should your company invest in Windows 7, or wait until Windows 8 is released? Although our readers have been clear they're not worried about Silverlight's future, others are not so confident.

What do you think about the Windows 8 announcement? Are you more excited or more irritated by the move?

Microsoft says it's "all in" for HTML5. But Silverlight isn't dead. Internet Explorer 9 and 10 enables developers to write the same markup and run it anywhere. But the browsers can do things no other browser can do, so you'll need to write different versions of your Web apps anyway. Microsoft is sending mixed messages.

Don't get me wrong. Internet Explorer and Windows Phone 7 look better than ever. And Microsoft really does seem to get the potential behind Kinect, its most innovative product in years. But the muddled message shows that Microsoft is still experiencing some difficulty figuring how to be an "open company," and is confusing hype with reality.

Today we're at Microsoft MIX, a developers conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft will be trying to woo developers and presenting on HTML5, Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight.

The event is kicking off with a keynote by Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president in charge of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.

Hachamovitch demoed Internet Explorer 10, and the platform preview is available here for you to check out yourself.

Tomorrow the interactive marketing agency BLITZ will release source code and scripts for using Kinect with Adobe Flash by way of Node.js. The company has also released a short video tutorial, embedded below, explaining how to get Kinect and Flash working together. BLITZ's solution should also work with Silverlight and Unity. The source code will be available from BLITZ's blog at 8:00 AM Pacific on January 12.

Microsoft has announced that over 40 new features will be added to Silverlight 5, which will be available in the first half of 2011. The announcement came at today's Silverlight Firestarter event. You can watch the keynote here. New features announced include: support for running Silverlight applications with desktop features in the browser, text enhancements, a GPU accelerated 3-D API and more.

Today Microsoft announced that its Visual Basic add-on for Windows Phone Developer Tools is now available in its final RTW version ("Release to Web"). With this add-on, Visual Basic developers who have built Silverlight applications and games for the Windows Phone 7 platform can finally ship their apps after months of testing and then have those apps published in the official Windows Phone Marketplace.

2010 has been a watershed year for the next version of HTML, the markup language that all web pages are written in. The reason for the emerging popularity of HTML5 strikes at the heart of a company by the name of Adobe: interactivity. Adobe's near ubiquitous Flash technology has been the default way to add interactivity to web pages since the dot com era. But in 2010, that began to change. HTML5 enables much the same type of functionality as Flash (and Microsoft's Silverlight for that matter). Using HTML5, developers can add features like video, animations and drag-and-drop.

Another reason for the emergence of HTML5 is the Mobile Web. Using HTML5, mobile developers can create browser-based mobile sites that have a similar sophistication to native mobile apps. Let's look back at the past year of HTML5 innovation...

Last week Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Division (STB) at Microsoft, told ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley that's Microsoft's Silverlight strategy had "shifted." Muglia described Silverlight as the development platform for Windows Phone 7 but indicated that Microsoft will be increasingly emphasizing HTML5. Microsoft's Joshua Allen claimed last year that Silverlight and HTML5 weren't in competition with each other, so this seems like quite an about-face for the company. What does this mean for Silverlight developers? Will you continue to learn and develop in Silverlight, or will you jump ship?

Update: Muglia issued a clarification on the Silverlight blog one minute after this post went live.

Mozilla just launched the latest update to its popular Firefox browser. This new version (3.6.4) introduces a number of stability and security fixes, but most importantly, Firefox now protects Windows and Linux users from browser crashes when the Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins freeze.