Silverlight not ready for the office of today | The Coffeehouse

Boomport
SG1: Deep Space Radar Telemetry is the job to have.

Hold your horse's, I think silverlight is great but I think most offices today have dual monitors. I want to have a Channel 9 video full screened on one monitor and work on the other. The problem is that once I give focus to another window on the other screen, Silverlight goes back to original size. That frankly Sucks! Now if there is a way please tell me. At least on Netflix I can F11 IE and the player takes most of the window. In channel 9 the player is small and doesn't resize based on the IE window its in. If channel 9 would at least have the player resize to the window it would be great. Then F11 would at least help. The ultimate solution though would be to allow the user to have control over what causes it to leave full screen and pause etc. I love that Silverlight pauses with the spacebar. I think that is the stupidist thing on flash.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

Always wondered why Silverlight un-maximized when it loses focus. Maybe there's a switch in the Silverlight app we can add to prevent this.

kettch

I think it was the "How Do I...?" videos on MSDN that used to have an option in the player to make the player fill the window instead of the screen. You could then maximise the window. They've since changed the player, so it doesn't do that any more.

LeoDavidson

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 6th @ 8:36 AM

Fullscreen Flash video does the same thing, FWIW.

Some full-screen video playback apps do it as well. It's quite annoying when I want to watch stuff on one monitor while browsing or chatting on another.

WMP, at least in Win 7, seems to handle things well, though. For Flash you could save the video as FLV and watch it in WMP if you have the required codec(FFDShow)+splitter(FLVSplitter.ax).

Not sure if you can extract + save SilverLight video as easily as you can with Flash video.

Of course, it's nicer if it Just Works when streaming in a browser. With a lengthy video it can be worth downloading it and watching it in something else, though.

figuerres
???

I have been thinking that possibly a small class / control could be done to fix this issue.

have "FullScreen" be "Size Of Desktop" and have an other button / option for "Open in New Window" to allow the user to size it normally.

should not be that hard i think...

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to kettch

#Oct 6th @ 9:49 AM

Let me ask around....

EDIT: Looks like it's for security reasons, spoofing attacks. There is more I'd like to say, but you will find out soon enough.

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

Adobe's official bull is - "security reasons." Although frankly I'm yet to figure out exactly how that is meant to work. You can map visible Vs. invisible screen realestate fairly easily and shrink in the case of the latter. You could also add an impossible to remove cross that only appears when you mouse over the top right. Heck, they could add a super-secret registry key that requires multiple levels of voodoo to add but they don't do that either.

That's why I hack my Flash's binary each new release to fix their broken software (either due to design flaws or apathy).

Microsoft just ripped off Flash blindly making all the same mistakes and without understanding why Flash falls apart on multiple monitors Microsoft just implemented it.

kettch

In reply to Ion Todirel

#Oct 6th @ 1:49 PM

A Silverlight 3 player that runs outside the browser? Tongue Out

magicalclick

Apparently my Flash does not do that when unfocsed. Perplexed Sometimes when I play Farmville in Facebook in full screen mode. When I need to make a wall post when I level up, it will exit full screen mode. But, a lot of times I just stuck and I can't do anything. I can press Window Orb to show task bar and all. But, the full screen mode is still there. And when I click IE anywhere (other tab or preview close button), it jumps back to Full Screen FarmVille again. I am trapped in Flash FullScreen. In this case, I really hope what your guys said is true, but, instead, I am forced to kill the process to quit the horrifying Flash Full Screen Mode.

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

In reply to magicalclick

#Oct 6th @ 9:00 PM

Press the escape key.

magicalclick

In reply to ManipUni

#Oct 6th @ 11:54 PM

That doesn't work. As I said, the Flash was stucked, it doesn't do mouse or keyboard. And it doesn't go back to normal state when I unfocus with my Windows Orb.

Boomport
SG1: Deep Space Radar Telemetry is the job to have.

In reply to ManipUni

#Oct 6th @ 2:29 PM

Fail to see how it could be a security reason. Like you said its easy to tell realestate of visible and non visible space. If its is taking all of the screen and there is only one screen the only way that it would be a issue is if they didn't allow another window to come on top, but since nothing can even get focus without it leaving full screen can't even test that senerio. I hate software that thinks for you. If you want to dumb down your software for the general user, great, less calls to support, but leave in a work around for those that can figure it out!

figuerres
???

In reply to Boomport

#Oct 7th @ 7:29 AM

what if....

an evil developer created a full screen app that was a carefull copy of a typical start menu and browser page?

with xaml i bet one could make a very good copy of the xp-task bar and start menu button plus the "chrome" of IE.

at that point they could possibly trick a user if they had normal keyboard and mouse inputs to play with...

figure this might target average users w/o dual display etc...

sure one could figure it out before very long but if it just had the user fooled for a few minutes to harvest CC numbers or passwords...

not good.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to figuerres

#Oct 7th @ 9:30 AM

That's why Silverlight is in a sandbox. If you do a "windows mimic" in Silverlight, you can't do anything with it.

AndyC

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 7th @ 9:38 AM

You can if you mimic another IE window opening and the user visiting their bank/online shopping site.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to AndyC

#Oct 7th @ 9:51 AM

"visiting their bank/online shopping site"

This is also info you can't get from Silverlight. I see no difference than email spam then. And the only desktop you'd be able to mimic is a blank plain one, not like you can get colours, background, icons or anything.

joechung

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 7th @ 9:58 AM

Sure, you can. Just ask the user to enter it. They call it phishing.

AndyC

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 7th @ 9:58 AM

95% of people never customize their desktop, at all. A significant subset of those are probably liable to fall for a rudimentary phishing attack. You probably need significantly less than 0.1% of all users to fall for it in order to rake in a huge profit.

kettch

In reply to AndyC

#Oct 7th @ 2:32 PM

I work on this old lady's computer once in a while, and one time she called me because some option in her AOL mail had disappeared. So, I went over to her house grumbling about the stupid AOL client software. She was on the phone when I go there, so she waved me into the office. I sat down at the computer and opened up AOL. Everything worked fine. When she came in I showed her the screen. She said "What did you do? I've been looking for that for days". I closed everything and had her sit down and show me. So, she opened up IE with aol.com as the home page and clicked on the mail link. *forehead smack*

Further (tactful) investigation revealed that she couldn't really tell the difference between the AOL client software and the webmail. Near as I can tell she stumbled on the webmail at some point and had been using that for the past week.

The moral of the story is that people are stupid and they are lucky to remember their own name.

figuerres
???

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 7th @ 9:58 AM

well first off i know that the full screen mode will not allow the full keybooard use for just this reason. that is really what stops this from working.

but just say that the black hat could enable full keybaord and mouse in full screen.

here is the case:

joe opens ie maximized to fill the desktop.

so his display is the start menu the task bar and IE.

now he goes to some site that has evil-silverlight-app and it does a fullscreen mode in a way that he does not realize what happened.

the sl app can find out what version of winbdows and ie via html bridge and javascript.

based on that it can load a style / skin to mimic the same.

now just have a list of say the top 10 banks and e-commerce domain names and store a set of templates on evil server for them.

user enters www.mybank.com and gets a skin that looks like his bank and he tries to login.

depending on how far the evil guy wants to go that might be all he needs....

if the list had say paypal , amazon , several banks ..... simulate some http errors and let him login a few times to different sites then exit the app...

user might not even realize what happened.

or figures his browser crashed and re-start windows.

but the black hat may now have some high value bank logins and cc #'s and his home address and whatever eles was entered.

right now as far as i know the current fullscreen mode locks out keyboard inputs in a way that stops this.

and this is why, cuase if full key and mouse worked with full screen this could be done.

Boomport
SG1: Deep Space Radar Telemetry is the job to have.

In reply to figuerres

#Oct 8th @ 5:38 AM

I think we are digressing. Developers know users are well, users.

When Silverlight is full screen you can do a lot of things. You can click the mouse and type on the keyboard. So I suppose if you had that look like the desktop you would be able to dork with people anyway.

The point though is that if want to have it on full screen mode on one screen, why not allow focus on another window on another screen? How is that so unsecure? Keyboard and focus isn't going into silverlight anyway. Why does it need to drop out of full screen mode? Maybe on a single monitor system that would make sense, but with more and more people having dual monitors, its lame!!!!

Like stated above, Channel 9 could make there viewer like Netflix's and have it resize at worse case. Lets just all join the new century. The hundreds of computers at work all have dual monitor and my personal computer as well as my wifes have dual monitor. This isn't a trend that is going away!