From the ‘Linux has it all’ files:
It wasn’t all that long ago that Moonlight 1.0 was released providing Linux users with a way to run Microsoft Silverlight media on their screens. Now Novell is out with the Moonlight 2.0 preview, including expanded functionality and compatibility with Microsoft’s media framework.
While Moonlight 1.0 includes some Silverlight 2.0 functionality, Moonlight 2.0 is even more closely aligned with what Microsoft is currently providing and has a few new items too.
“The biggest single point I think is this – we’re finally comfortable
releasing a browser plugin containing the Mono VM,” Chris Toshok’s Moonlight team lead blogged. “This is pretty huge,
and the runtime guys deserve a lot of credit for making it possible.
This means we’ve invested enough time and effort into fleshing out the
infrastructure (CoreCLR, as well as our metadata and IL verifier), and
getting it to a point where we’re not totally embarrassed to share our
work.”
Having the VM inside of the browser plugin is a key step, but at this point it’s also not secure (yet). Toshok noted that,”.. a full security audit has not
happened, and that by visiting Silverlight sites you are downloading
code that will execute on your system.” However, on Linux of course, most users don’t run as root (SUDO doesn’t auto-execute either) so the damage would be limited to the access of the user.