Isn't this "war" really only in Microsoft's mind anyway? - Brian Sullivan

Silverlight has the Olympics on NBC, so they'll get adoption. - Robert Scoble

I left my comment on your blog - want to make sure the non-FF audience sees it, too. - Dossy Shiobara

hey hey hey! who said silverlight was the better technology!? - Greg North

I woud have thought Silverlight needed the breaks. - john conroy

Isint silverlight straight XAML? That means its text and can be indexed. The real question here is what will microsoft do in response? - Roberto Bonini

Silverlight will be a threat but it will take some time. That's great if everyone has the plugin thanks to the Olympics but if developers aren't using it then that plugin is useless. I think it has a ton of advantages over Flash from a developer standpoint as well so really there isn't any reason it shouldn't catch on with some time. - Devlin Dunsmore from twhirl

We need to remember that this is not a perfect search engine solution for flash. There is a lot more that has to be done to really index flash to be able to rank highly in the Search engines. It is a great step forward though. Also, how easy would it be for Microsoft to come, just like adobe and say, here is a technology to crawl our software, why don't you use this. - Tim Flint

Older Flash movies win here. Most modern Flash sites store the content externally in xml and even then it's hard to tell what content is meant to be displayed. - Andrew Smith

Silverlight stores XAML in a ZIP file that's sent to the client. It is the better technology (C# on the client as opposed to ActionScript). But the tooling and community is seriously lacking still. - xero

funny how the title of the story says adobe gets a "break" then in the story he declares ms silverlight "game over". counting out microsoft is just stupid. - adolfo foronda

Here's ESRIA.com analysis: Let's also not forget that a lot of pagerank has to do with external deeplinks directed to your site. Web users have years of discouraging experiences bookmarking Flash sites, to the point that most don't think to copy-paste the address bar and drop a link on their blog, even if it's being updated by the Flash element via JavaScript. In this regard, Flash sites without an HTML frame will always be at an SEO disadvantage no matter what Adobe wants to say. - Bob Stewart from twhirl

"Silverlight might be better technology, but if it doesn’t get indexed by the two biggest search engines it’s game over." So, the inability to index Flash to this point doomed it? Who wins the Flash vs. Silverlight war will have nothing to do with Google's index. - Sprague D

I hope both Flash and Silverlight will vanish as Javascript gets better and better. - Ole Begemann

Yeah lots of good tools and libraries coming out for javascript that are making it easier to do interactive features that don't need flash or silverlight anymore. - Ralph Whitbeck

This sorta feels like much ado about very little. What really matters is if the Flash content gets indexed in any MEANINGFUL way. PDFs get indexed but you have very little control over the display of the search engine results, so the listing itself is often meaningless. There are no navigation links in PDFs, so when you view the file, there's no way to navigate to the site to which it belongs, short of stripping down the URL, which most people won't do. Let's see indexed Flash in action. - David Erickson

@David, that's the main thing about this announcement. Google has indexed Flash application for a long time in generally the same way they index PDF (doa filetype:swf search). But now with this player, Google will have a lot more information about both what is inside the SWF and how it got there. Combine that with some of what SWFAddress has been doing with deep linking and hopefully this will make the Flash search experience much better for the end user. - Ryan Stewart

I did a research project back in 2000 that set out to prove we never needed Flash to begin with. And we didn't. Everything someone did in Flash I managed to do in DHTML (JavaScript and Ajax for you new guys). It's just a matter of how widespread the DHTML talent is. Though I'll have to say that the readily available JS packages have made life easier. Used to have to code all of that ourselves. - xero

DHTML / Javascript is now, and always will be, a lousy and fragile environment for anything serious. Flash and Silverlight really are the next steps. Javascript is badly implemented and inconsistent (and its not just MS with the problem, the spec is ambiguous). The reason Flash is gaining ground is that it is unified and consistent across browsers and platforms. Silverlight is all that WITH a real language and dev environment. - Soulhuntre

Robert, MJ Foley asked MS -- answer: Silverlight was designed to be SEO friendly http://blogs.zdnet.com/microso... - Sprague D

This is of little benefit if the content is many clicks deep within the application. Unless the content can be indexed by a specific URL then this is of little benefit. You will still need to design with crawlability in mind. This is no silver bullet. - Brad Curtis from twhirl

@Sprague D sure, Silverlight layout is specified in XAML. However the content is usually stored externally to this and is often retrieved dynamically. You cannot simply crawl the Silverlight XAML. - Brad Curtis from twhirl