Firefox 3 and Silverlight

I've been doing some work with Silverlight over the last couple of weeks and ran into this question yesterday (specifically re. SL 1.0). The issue arose since Firefox 3 came out after Silverlight 1.0 and is related to silverlight detection, meaning that Firefox 3 wouldn’t pick up on the Silverlight installation. There is a new version of Silverlight.js available now which has some changes to the isInstalled method to cover the FireFox 3 scenario.

You can see the old behavior by looking at https://timheuer.com/ff3oldscript in FF 3. Note that it doesn’t pick up the SL installation. 

You can check FF 3 against a silverlight app that has the fix applied by going to https://timheuer.com/ff3newscript/ - this demonstrates the effect the change to Silverlight.js has had, i.e. the app is available as normal. The installation experience for a FF user on a machine without Silverlight installed is pretty smooth too (the page refreshed post-intallation and voila).

Tim Heuer has posted more detail about this on his blog at:

https://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/07/02/updating-your-silverlight-javascript-detection.aspx

and

https://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/17/silverlight-and-firefox-3-updates.aspx

The exec summary is that the latest Silverlight SDK includes an updated Silverlight.js file with the necessary fixes in script detection that works with FF3. You don't have to immediately upgrade Silverlight 1.0 applications to Silverlight 2, but the update is in the Silverlight 2 SDK.