3

Silverlight stopped supporting PowerPC Macs after version 1.0. Will Moonlight 2.0 work on a PowerPC Mac?

We are looking at writing the next generation of our product and we are considering Silverlight. However due to our existing customer base, we could not afford to cut off PowerPC Mac users at this time, and we'd like to avoid parallel development.

Todd Ropog
  • 1,133
  • 1
  • 14
  • 23
  • 1
    Your customer base is using 5+ year old Apple computers? What kind of market are you in?! – idrumgood Aug 13 '09 at 14:19
  • 2
    First of all, we're in the education industry, which tends to lag a bit on the technology front. Second, PowerPCs aren't quite that old. Apple was still shipping PowerPC Macs in 2006. – Todd Ropog Aug 13 '09 at 14:30
  • I grew up in an education industry family. Used a mac my entire life (25 years). I'm a Windows 7 man now, and my father's school district just switched to PC after 15 years of Mac. I realize this is of no use to your issue. But sounds to me like your customer base would benefit from you using something that it can run. Um... Clarisworks? – idrumgood Aug 13 '09 at 14:42
  • 2
    In Entertainment Industry which is where we have maximum products, we have 25% to 30% people still on PowerPC, and we expect they will atleast take a year to switch. And believe me we can not force customer to spend $1500 for using silverlight instead of flash. – Akash Kava Aug 27 '09 at 13:17

3 Answers3

5

Moonlight currently is made up of a few components:

  • Mono Runtime (cross platform, works on many platforms, including PowerPC and OSX)
  • Graphics engine (cross platform)
  • Video engine (cross platform)
  • Browser gate (currently only supports Firefox)
  • Windowing system integration (currently only supports X11)

There have been discussions about writing more browser gateways for new browsers, but so far it has not been a priority. If Moonlight were to be ported to the Mac, a gate to Safari would be necessary.

Currently Moonlight is very tied to the X11 implementation, so that piece would also have to be decoupled to work on other windowing systems.

It should be relatively easy (couple of weeks of work) to get the Moonlight engine to run on the Mac. Doing the gateway to the browser might be a few more weeks.

Miguel.

miguel.de.icaza
  • 32,654
  • 6
  • 58
  • 76
2

Moonlight requires an x86 processor, so it won't work on PowerPC. Here's the Moonlight supported platforms list.

Jon Galloway
  • 52,327
  • 25
  • 125
  • 193
  • I only see Linux OSs listed there, does that mean Moonlight is strictly Linux only, i.e. is it impossible to run it on an x86 Mac? I realize it could simply run Silverlight directly, but if for some reason you wanted to run Moonlight on an x86 Mac (for testing maybe), is that not possible? – Todd Ropog Aug 13 '09 at 16:06
  • 1
    I checked with Geoff Norton, one of the Mono developers. His answer: "Currently, no. Future, maybe. For more information, its not x86 specific at all, we can run on any arch, we just have to port to OSX runloops/browsers." – Jon Galloway Aug 13 '09 at 20:02
0

I don't think Moonlight runs on OsX at all. I can't find any reference to it running on Mac. Does anyone have a link that shows otherwise?

James Cadd
  • 12,136
  • 30
  • 85
  • 134
  • Quotes like the following would lead me to believe that it did at one time: "the Mono team created a Silverlight 1.0-compatible Linux player that works with both Linux and Mac PowerPC machines." http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/01/21/Moonlight-shines-on-inauguration.aspx – Todd Ropog Aug 13 '09 at 19:48