Introducing Offline and Out of Browser support in Silverlight

Today we are making a radical upgrade to your web experience with Silverlight 3’s support for offline and out of browser apps. App authors can now build one app that works in the browser and out; at home, at work or on the go.

Among the new set of features enabling this experience are:

• Sticky presence on the desktop: Upon user consent, a Silverlight app can be detached and pinned on the user’s desktop using familiar OS metaphors for this action. On Windows this can be through Start menu and/or Desktop shortcuts. On the Mac the user can drag and drop the application bundle to a location of their choice.
• Run outside of browser: activating the app locally launches it outside of the web browser. Our data suggests consumers find this more intuitive as a result of clicking on a desktop shortcut. 
• Safe by default: Silverlight still retains a rigid security sandbox within which the app operates. Apps cannot elevate beyond the privileges granted by this sandbox. Our philosophy is to stretch this sandbox by providing features within it on a case by case basis. More on this in future.
• Non-administrative install: Along with the sandbox, Silverlight furthers the consumer’s security by never requiring administrative privileges either for install or for run. An exception may be if optionally a user on the Mac wants to drop the app bundle into a dir that requires sign-on. In that case Silverlight honors the framework set out by the OS and user intuition.
• Higher default persistence space: the default quota for Isolated Storage for Out of Browser apps is a higher value than for browser based apps. It is currently 25MB.
• Network awareness: One of the key ingredients of this feature set is the ability for Silverlight apps to be aware of network connectivity and to be notified when that changes. Apps can cache data (or outbound calls) into Isolated Storage and post-back (or playback) when connectivity is regained. This works in Silverlight apps in the browser and out.
• Built-in auto update: Silverlight will check for new versions of the app asynchronously upon app requesting such a check, guaranteeing users an instant-on experience. Updates are applied at next launch, providing apps complete control over when and how frequently updates are applied with Silverlight doing all the heavy lifting.
• Execution state notifications to the app: Silverlight notifies the app on momentous events throughout its lifetime and transition from in-browser to out-of-browser, allowing the app to model its UI accordingly.

A short note on our philosophy before I end: When my team and I originally started thinking about delivering this feature set, we were absolutely certain about some things. Namely that this would be inherently a part of Silverlight, requiring no new runtimes/frameworks, no additional downloads, no new learning curve for app authors, no security elevations for consumer installs. That is the Carmot, if you will, in our offline and out of browser support. We’re also introducing a user experience that – in my biased opinion – fits well with the rest of the web; a model that allows consumers to try before they install; a model that takes an app familiar to them on the Web and makes it a companion on their desktop. Contrast that a model that requires consumers to have “install intent” and click on a hyperlink or a badge in good faith to experience an app they haven’t hitherto seen. There’s certainly a place for that install model and we’ve supported that in other products in the past for non-Web scenarios. And finally, I’m closely watching where support for offline applications in HTML5 goes and how mainstream browsers adopt it. At some point I do want our model to co-exist with the experiences they introduce.

Developers can evaluate and play with the Silverlight 3 Beta build these apps using Silverlight 3 right now. There's great runtime and tools support.

In future posts, I will be introducing this feature set from a technical perspective.

Post script: You can now understand why there’s been radio silence on this blog for months. This feature took a lot of Mountain Dew, sweat and tiers from a couple handful of the best darned engineers in the world. And a lot of questions, comments, critiques and feedback from the best darned customers a product can have. Here’s to takeoff and the EAP!

[Update 10-Jul-09] Auto-update section modified based on changes post beta; now reflective of Silverlight 3 RTW behavior
[Update 25-Jul-09] Links updated to Silverlight 3 RTW

Email this | Bookmark this