From Yakov Fain's Blog

Who’s better looking – Flash Player or Silverlight?

As of today, 98% of the world computer users know what Flash Player is and only 2% or so know what’s Silverlight. But this will change pretty soon because Silverlight is nothing else but a new name of Microsoft’s WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere).

Or to put it simple, it’s a Web browser plugin that supports Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari.

While Flash Player applications can be developed by Flash, Flex or OpenLaszlo developers, applications for Silverlight can be developed in Visual Studio or Expression studio. I’ve seen the demo of these IDEs last month at Microsoft, and they looked very good.

Both Flash Player and Silverlight can read any plain HTTP feed. Flex also offers faster binary protocols for communication with the server side applications written in Java and other languages, including a third party solution (offered by Midnight Coders) for integration with .Net. I am not sure if there are any such deals for fast communication between Silverlight and non .Net applications.

For streaming video for Flash Player you can use either Flash Media Server or open source Red 5. For streaming video for Silverlight, you can use Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

As of today, Flash Player is far ahead in terms of install base and it’ll take Microsoft lots and lots of efforts to come even close to the leader. But I’m sure Microsoft will be in a much better situation a year from now, and they won’t need to use Flash Player for online commercials of their future versions of Windows as they did with Vista.