First Moonlight Release

by Miguel de Icaza

Today we are making the first public release of Moonlight, supporting the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux. The release comes in two forms:

  • No-media codecs supported, but easy to install: head to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight and click on the cute installer for Moonlight. This currently hosts builds for Linux x86 and x86-64 for Firefox.
  • Source-code compilation, but you can optionally compile FFMpeg codecs yourself. To do this, download our moon-0.6.tar.bz2. And follow the build instructions.

Update: I apologize for the confussion; This is not Moonlight 1.0, this is the first source code release that we are making of Moonlight for interested contributors and developers. This release is not even a Beta release, as we are not yet feature complete (missing components in media codecs, the media pipeline, as well as fixing about 70 known bugs). Apologies for any confussion.

Although Moonlight works on Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, recent changes in Firefox 3 prevent Silverlight and Moonlight from working (For details see #432371, #430965). There is a user contributed Greasemonkey script that will work around this bug for some sites (requires Greasemonkey).

Windowless: Moonlight supports "windowless" mode, a mechanism that allows Silverlight content to blend with other HTML ements on a page. This is only supported by Firefox 3, users of older versions of Firefox might run into Silverlight applications and web sites that do not work correctly as many Silverlight applications depend on this functionality (Flash sites have the same problem with Firefox 2).

1.1 and 2.0 support: This release only supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile. The 1.1 support is no longer maintained and the release happened at the time when we are transitioning the APIs to 2.0.

If you find bugs, please file them for us to fix.

Posted on 13 May 2008