This is very good news indeed, as it will enable Linux users to run Silverlight websites natively. Since the development is sponsored by Novell, and they have a partnership with Microsoft, they were even able to throw in the official Microsoft codecs, meaning even more compatibility.

While I’m personally a bit sceptic about this Novell/M$ marriage, in this case it’s clearly proving to be a good step. Who would have thought not so long ago that Linux users would ever get free software with official Microsoft licensed codecs in it? Right, nobody .

I think a lot of Linux people are eargerly waiting for this one. Microsoft themselves promised some time ago a plugin for Silverlight on Linux, but so far I haven’t seen one bit of that promise. And since they are able to provide one for Mac OS X, I find it quite strange that they leave the Linux community out in the cold. Maybe I’m wrong on this one as I haven’t really followed up on it so well, so please, if you know more then me, don’t be shy and leave a comment .

I can’t wait to check this thing out. Probably it won’t be working 100%, but hey it’s still a beta after all, and at least some compatibility is already appreciated. Big thanks to Novell & Microsoft for this one .

This new version, which is supposed to be an even more fierceful competitor for Adobe’s popular Flash player, looks very promising. Among one of the most eye-catching improvements is the promise that this new version will be shipped with cross-platform and cross-browser support.

Supported platforms are Microsoft Windows (duh ), Mac OS X, but surprisingly, also Linux. For the browser world, you can use Internet Explorer (another big duh of course), but also Firefox and Safari.

I’m glad too see Microsoft has gotten the message from the community and is releasing this functionality also for Mac & Linux users. With version 1 so closely tied to their own Windows platform, they have had a lot of criticism to endure. Of course Mono (2) promised to partly cover these platforms, but it’s nice to see that our Redmond friends took a closer look at some other popular operating systems.

On the browser side, I’m a bit disappointed to not see any Opera support. Probably in the next few weeks we’ll see some workarounds and community patches surfacing for this, but nevertheless, I’m surprised it’s not natively supported. However I’m sure this is only a matter of time.

Whether this newest Silverlight release will be nibbling at the market share of Flash is still to be seen. So far, I haven’t really seen much use of it myself, apart from during the Beijing Olympics, where Microsoft had cleverly set up some partnerships in an attempt to boost their software use. The main drawback at the time was of course the lack of support for other browsers and platforms. Now that this has been solved (however yet to be proven), Silverlight can finally really take off. Probably more partnerships with big content providers are coming, but now at least it has a good chance of breaking through to the mainstream.

I’m sure that we’ll hear and mostly see more about this the coming weeks/months. For the time being, I’m going to take a look how Silverlight performs on my Ubuntu/Firefox setup . To be continued …

Update 15/10: Tried to download it yesterday for Linux, but currently the runtime for this platform is not yet available… Only Windows & Mac are to be found.