If you run Safari on a G5 Mac, avoid Silverlight
Welcome to more Microsoft goodness! The latest installment, after having to uninstall Office Mac because of its constant bombing: now the Silverlight virus bombs your Safari…
You may have noticed that bombing is so common on Office Mac 2008 (running on G5 Quad-core, all versions up to 10.5.8 OS X) that the latest Mac version of Office enters into bomb-recovery-auto-save every 30-60 seconds? Well, if you know you will bomb, I guess wasting your users’ time is marginally better than actually bombing, isn’t it?
Well, the latest installment of the bombing masters is this virus Microsoft calls “Silverlight”… Take the latest version of the G5 (possibly the best debugged OS ever to run on a known platform); take Safari, one of the most robust browser available (not perfect, but robust). Now, go to any Silverlight-heavy site (you can find them by searching for SharePoint Web Sites – every consultant in the SharePoint ecology is busy using Silverlight for everything that would be well served by CSS and basic JS).
In any case, let’s say that you still need to see what the stupid Silverlight control contains (you may be doing research for work), you’ll need to install the “plug-in”. Otherwise, when you get there you will find that there are blank boxes all over the place (put mildly, Silverlight doesn’t degrade too well, as other types of compost). The white boxes have that “Get Silverlight or f**k off” messages… Now, you will go through the installation (only version 1 of Silverf**k supports the G5 architecture). But don’t even think it will work… So far, trying it in three out of three G5-based Macs, when you find one of those sites plastered with Silverf**k, Safari will bomb in one of the nastiest ways it can (be ready to press that On/Off button).
While the machine bombs, and you are waiting for the reboot, it may be a good moment to meditate on why, considering that we have a well debugged, proven, multi-platform media delivery vehicle (called Flash), already installed in 98% of all personal computers worldwide, why do we need a buggy, surely bloated (just give it two months or so), almost certainly privacy insensitive and platform-paranoid piece of junk software… Um…
This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 9:45 am and is filed under nausea, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.