Firefox Warning Casts Shadow on Microsoft's Silverlight

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has made its Silverlight web-development technology a big part of its web services and future .NET strategy, but a pesky little warning when it meets up with the Firefox browser at times is highlighting a potential achilles heel for Microsoft.

Microsoft Technical Evangelist Jaime Rodriguez puts it this way: "The warning is prompted by Mozilla's heuristics to check on long running scripts (details on these heuristics way below). The problem is that for silverlight or any plug-in that makes Javascript calls, Firefox some times does not reset the timer for the scripts called from plug-ins: If you fire multiple events from a plug-in the events are obviously handled sequentially, if a new event happens while an event handler is executing, then Firefox does not reset its counter for the script time out; it measures the time from these two events as a single script."

What happens next in that scenario is that a Silverlight-based page with the scripts in question gets jammed up, and a warning ensues. Rodriguez suggests ways to work around the problem on the part of those building stuff using Silverlight. The workaround appears straightforward, but it means some extra steps for someone developing with Silverlight.

"FYI, the issue has been reported to Mozilla and they seem to be on it, but of course given ship cycles, priorities, etc. . . we might not see a change for a while," Rodriguez writes.

It does not appear as if the Firefox warning impacts every Silverlight page, but Mozilla now has an interesting dilemma. With limited resources and many demands as it works to move Firefox into its version 3 final release, as well as create a mobile platform, how much of Mozilla's limited resources is set to work on Microsoft's problem?

Silverlight is Microsoft's attempt to compete with Adobe's Flash technology. In the battle to control eyeballs and platforms, the ability for each to work smoothly with the popular Firefox browser will be critical.

This is one poker table where Mozilla is holding some interesting cards.