Way back in 2007 I scoffed at a little thing from Microsoft called Silverlight. Well, I'm not laughing any more. Now at 3.0, Silverlight's feature set is growing fast. Apparently MS released the new version a little early, so go here to download it and give it a test drive.

There are significant updates under the hood with major ramifications. First, Silverlight has always been adept at handling streaming video. But Smooth Streaming, which debuted at E3, allows you to watch HD video instantly. As Neowin points out, there's a terrific demo here. Silverlight also now supports H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs, which is exceptionally handy for people encoding for a wide variety of platforms.

There's a lot of enhancements that Flash was late to the party on, including SEO improvements (long the bane of such dynamic plug-in media), and multi-touch support. Coupled with some server side enhancements (Ars has a good round up here), this makes Silverlight an easier sell for webheads concerned with search and data-centric sites.

Perhaps the most tantalizing bit are the "out of browser" experiences promised by the 3.0 update. This is a direct shot at Adobe's AIR efforts, and is lovingly detailed here.

Naturally Silverlight works on PC's running Windows and Macs (Intel and PPC, although version 2 and 3 only support Intel). Sorry Linux, still no love there.