I would like to develop a cross platform application, i'm not sure which is best to use for a desktop application
Microsoft Silverlight
Adobe Air
Java? (don't want to do this)
Firefox Add-On?
I would like to develop a cross platform application, i'm not sure which is best to use for a desktop application
Microsoft Silverlight
Adobe Air
Java? (don't want to do this)
Firefox Add-On?
Write it in Flash.
This is an old question but at the end of 2015 Electron is the option I went for. Its built on Node.js and Chromium which has to be one of the most highly maintained rendering engines around. You get WebGL, video and audio support and even PDF printing all built in. I've even got it reading legacy hardware drivers using node-ffi. It's getting a lot of commits and Microsoft have built their open source code editor (Visual Studio Code) on top of it.
Back in 2010 you would have to be pretty skilled to write huge desktop apps in JavaScript, but with ES2016 or Typscript that's no longer the case. If there are parts of your app where you're not happy with the performance of JavaScript you can always drop into a native module.
You need to define which platforms you mean to include. If you just mean windows/mac/linux than any of those (even c#/silverlight) will be okay and you should choose what you know best.
If you want a little more reach (proprietary unix, potential expansions into smartphones, etc) your options are narrowed down a little.