As best as I can determine, Silverlight 1.1 for OS X is Intel only. I’ve installed both the 1.0 beta and the 1.1 version of Silverlight on my G4 iBook. The 1.0 version works fine, but the 1.1 version crashes both Firefox and Safari. I think it’s intentional and I think my confusion is due to the confusing state of the Silverlight sites.
There are two different Silverlight sites. microsoft.com/silverlight and the community site at silverlight.net.
You can’t get to the system requirements for Silverlight through the community site (in fact, there is a link called “system requirements” on that page, but nothing seems to be clickable for me right now). If you click on “getting Started” at the community site and click on the links to download the specific version for your platform, the system requirements only state “OS X 10.4+”. You can only get to them by going to the main microsoft.com/silverlight downloads page. There I found the system requirements
System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Power PC Processor
* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Power PC G3 500-megahertz (MHz) or faster processor
System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Intel Processor
* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM
System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Intel Processor
* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM
It’s a not so subtle difference. It’s something to keep in mind if you are a PowerPC owner and want to play with Silverlight. You’re stuck with version 1.0. No Dynamic CLR for you! It’d be nice if a MS employee would post a notice about future PPC support for Silverlight?
3 Comments
That’s wierd. If you look at the 1.1 plugin (/Library/Internet Plugins/Silverlight.pkg), it seems to be a Universal binary. But I highly doubt it was “intentional”.
Well, I don’t mean intentional in a malicious sense. I mean it as “Microsoft is aware that it only works on Intel processors and that’s why the requirements for the two versions are listed differently”.
My guess is that it has a LOT to do with the dynamic CLR included with 1.1 since the agcore.dll is seemingly identical between the two versions. It’s got to be hard enough to port the CLR over to a new OS w/o having to worry about porting it to a new CPU architecture.
My guess is that the compile the clr dll’s outside of the Xcode environment and just mark the plugin as a Universal package. Or it could be a simple bug in the framework loader that only shows up on PPC machines.
Agree. It would be awesome for Microsoft to clarify this.
There are no error messages or anything at all that indicates why this doesn’t work. After install on my 12″ PB, it just keeps asking to install the 1.1 runtime. Even the installer permits installation on PowerPC …
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