OK, so this is going to be one of those Microsoft vs everyone else rants but I can’t help it – there’s a reason they keep cropping up.
Many moons ago I visited the Microsoft website for assistance in fixing a problem they’d created and was asked to install Silverlight. Since my job involves keeping up to date with web technologies I installed it and as far as I know haven’t used it since.
It turns out that one website does use it – Sky Player. I use Sky Player when I’m working in the evenings so i work on one Mac and then watch TV or a film on Sky Player using my Laptop.
At the weekend I was working a bit on Friday night and loaded up Firefox to go to Sky Player. Firefox then informed me that a plugin wanted to be run in 32 bit mode – a message I hadn’t seen before but I assumed was due to the recent upgrade to Firefox 5 which must now natively run in 64 bit and some plugins haven’t been updated yet. Since I knew Flash was alright, that’s when I found out it was running Silverlight.
Now here’s my problem with Microsoft and Silverlight. You upgrade Firefox and sometimes it informs you that you need to upgrade Flash too and so you do and then everything just keeps working nicely. Not so with Microsoft. Because everything they do has to have a business / revenue generating reason behind it, they don’t play well with others. That means that Firefox doesn’t inform you that Silverlight needs to be updated.
So, why is this a downside? Well, because in the case of Sky Player, they use a system to authenticate devices so you can only watch stuff through your Sky account on a number of devices and one of those must be authenticated as the main device, so in my case I have accountname-Mac, accountname-Windows and accountname-Xbox with the Mac being the main device. However when I went in at the weekend, it was saying the device I was using wasn’t registered and it would be registered automatically. Except that it was in the registered device list and wouldn’t add itself again or become authenticated so I couldn’t watch anything.
Arrrggghhh, they annoy me.