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Microsoft has gone rather quiet later over its Silverlight rich web media platform, a potential challenger to Adobe's Flash/AIM systems. But the software giant says next year's release of Windows Mobile 7, on which its hopes of survival as a mobile OS player rest, will integrated Silverlight 3.0, allowing the web apps framework to span the three screens - PC, TV and mobile.

"We are 100% dedicated to seeing Silverlight across all three screens," said Brian Goldfarb, marketing director for Silverlight, talking to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And release 3.0 will have a far wider remit, taking on Adobe, which is increasingly positioning itself as the key web development technology that can work across device types and operating systems. While existing Silverlight versions runs as a media player or a website creation toolset, release 3.0 will be a broader platform for third party apps development.

"We look at Silverlight as a sort of comprehensive runtime platform," Goldfarb said - "a cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device solution." While this echoes most of the goals of Adobe, Microsoft will be unable to avoid Flash and many device makers will support both platforms. RIM is reported to be planning to integrate full Silverlight and Flash support in future versions of the BlackBerry browser, while Nokia gave Microsoft a significant boost last year by joining the Silverlight supporters' group for its smartphones.

At last week's Intel Developer Forum, the old 'Wintel' axis was looking increasingly strained as Intel pushed its Moblin Linux-based OS into Windows territories such as full-blown notebooks, but the two former familiars were still friendly over Silverlight. The rich media plug-in technology would be supported on Moblin early next year, they promised, once release 3.0 was fully available. This is one of a string of small but important moves by Microsoft away from single-OS religion and towards supporting open source OSs.

Microsoft said: "We see this is a clear extension of our current efforts with Novell where we are building an open source implementation of Silverlight called 'Moonlight' that is targeted at the broad range of Linux-based PCs."

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