Silverlight 3, has brought RIA development platform closer to Adobe Flash. It is much more robust and feature rich compared to previous versions. However, Silverlight still lags behind Flash as a RIA platform.

Market Penetration:

Silverlight is still has much less market penetration compared to Flash. It lags market penetration among developer as wells as user base. Even Microsoft is well aware of it and it uses Flash for the “video preview” for new Bing search service.