Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight for Unix systems has officially reached its 1.0 level. They are feature complete, they pass all the Microsoft regression test suites and they shipped support for Microsoft's Media Pack for x86 and x86-64 architectures.

Moonlight is available as a Firefox plugin that can be installed with a single click from the moonlight download page.

What is in Moonlight 1.0

Moonlight 1.0 contains the plugin that can be used in Firefox 2 and 3 on Unix systems using the X11 windowing system.

Moonlight 1.0 (and Silverlight 1.0) both come with a graphics pipeline, video and audio frameworks and a javascript bridge and neither one of them contains an actual execution environment. The execution environment is the browser's own Javascript engine. When developers build 1.0-based plugins they script all of the functionality using the browser's own Javascript engine.

The browser Javascript engine communicates with Silverlight (or Moonlight) through the Javascript API exposed by the plugin.

With Silverlight 2.0 and Moonlight 2.0 in addition to this model where the browser's Javascript drives the interaction a new model is available: the ECMA CLI execution system powers the actual execution of the code and will deliver performance anywhere between 20 to 300 times faster execution speed than even the most modern Javascript implementation if you use a strongly typed language like C# or Boo.

…read more online…  http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Feb-11.html