Wordsteal and Worldox: they require additional software

I had tried to find wordox online before, and I heard of a french site that supposedly hosted it, but, I think it was down at the time.

Today I tried again while searching for wordsteal too. It turns out that I found a forum somewhere that had a recent entry that indicated both sites were up, but just recently up.

I went to them.

One requires Silverlight. I'm running Ubuntu. I was not impressed. I finally booted up with Windows, and installed Silverlight. Then I played a game. It was ok, and it looked fine. But there were a lot of rules and turn skipping that occurred whenever I made a mistake with entering a word. It would skip my turn!

And then I tried the other site, it said that it required Java. I have java on my computer, but it still wouldn't run. I tried it both in Windows and in Ubuntu Linux. I read on a forum somewhere that there was a special java runtime required under Linux. I found a site for that special version, but when I got there, it seemed like too much work to find the right download and install it.

I've seen the new Scramble (scramblelovers.com) , and it runs without a hitch... we what's there so far. I think it must use some fancy javascript or something. It looks pretty too.

My point is, in this day and age, I think Internet users are expecting sites to run without having to add software.