Have you ever danced with the Kindle in the pale Moonlight?

February 26, 2013 1:07 PM

I recently bought a Kindle Fire and want to use Silverlight on it (or some analogue, such as Moonlight). All my google searching indicates that there are a whole host of technical difficulties involved, and there is all sorts of unconfirmed speculation like "Well, maybe if you sideloaded Firefox and then installed Moonlight... that might work... possibly." I don't like messing around with new device software based on random people's hypotheses. Has anybody successfully managed some way to do this which you can personally confirm worked on your Kindle device?
posted by wolfdreams01 to Technology (6 answers total)

Is there some site in particular you want to work?

Because I'd work backwards. See if the site you want to work will work with moonlight in linux on a real machine, and then work backwards towards getting it to work under firefox running on Amazon's forked version of android.
posted by Oktober at 1:30 PM on February 26, 2013

Best answer: Silverlight does not run on Android tablets.

http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/Get-Started/Install/Default.aspx
posted by wongcorgi at 2:01 PM on February 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was going to say "you could maybe run moonlight", but it seems like all of the distributables are for x86 hardware. They do offer Android/iOS development tools based on Mono, but that doesn't really help you.

So, yeah. You might be able to either 1) find a dedicated android app or 2) see if you site has a fallback to h.264 streaming for mobile devices, but as far as running silver/moonlight you're probably SOL.
posted by Oktober at 2:10 PM on February 26, 2013

If all you're getting in your Googling is just "well, maybe..." answers, it's pretty certain that it's not currently possible.
posted by zsazsa at 3:57 PM on February 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

As wongcorgi said, there's no Silverlight for Android. And Moonlight was officially abandoned due to lack of interest several months ago. I tried using the Moonlight plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu the other week, and it seemed rather buggy.

Also seconding Oktober's suggestion: if there's a specific website you need, try it first with Moonlight on a Linux machine. If that doesn't work, there's no point in pursuing it further.
posted by pont at 11:07 PM on February 26, 2013

Thirding that you check out the specific website on a Linux machine. And I'll go beyond just checking out Moonlight - try installing Firefox and Silverlight into Wine, too. I've found some sites that require Silverlight, like the tools on the D&D website, actually require more than just Silverlight. They need actual Windows underneath.
posted by charred husk at 7:29 AM on February 27, 2013