Another failure in Web page styling and design.

Good point, Vid....and to think Microsoft is a huge company that still can't get it right!

I've often found that many critics are some of the worst offenders.

There are so many things wrong with the styling on this page that it's hard to decide where to begin.

Not withstanding that the title of the page is 'INSTALL SILVERLIGHT' when the very next paragraph indicates that it is already installed.

Sidebar
There is clearly enough room to make the text larger and more readable... why the small print?

The steps that have been done and the steps yet to be done, indicating any mutually exclusive or optional options would much better be represented using a graphical tree structure or a flow chart with past steps shaded..

'Find an Expert' is an option that I would place before 'Start Building' but actually, there should be an option before even installing the software to find out what it does, why you would want to install it, and some assurance that if you are dissatisfied with it, it can be easily removed... also, some reviews would be nice from experts other than Microsoft employees.

WHITESPACE is probably the most common abused layout element.
The line-height is too small in the paragraph text.
The distance both before and after the paragraph headers is identical... there should be more distance before than after indicating that the header is clearly associated with the following paragraph

'For Apple Users' and 'For Firefox Users' should be headers or at least bold because they are exclusive sections not body text. These instructions should also be further indented to reflect their mutual exclusiveness.

** This is really senseless because browser detection was available when the page was requested so the server should have known what browser the visitor was using eliminating the need for this option.

Any text given in the instructions referencing text displayed by the program should be styled to clearly indicate that this is program output and not instructions.

The wrong quote characters are used... should be opening and closing quotes.

Images (icons) should be used wherever possible to make it easier for non-english readers to follow.

Then again the styling of THIS page doesn't exactly set the standard either.

At first look, I was thinking what is wrong with that...all the links are the same color at least. Then I read your notes on the image, and saw how the list items were not links.....bad, bad, bad. microsoft. You don't need usability testing for that one.

Hey, how come people like us have time to post on matter of importance like this?
For us knowing MS Word it's pretty obvious the headers are headers and the links are links.
Yes I agree it is not the best design, but come on...

It's sad, really, that such simple ideas get overlooked in page design. There is nothing wrong with pretty, as long as the obvious doesn't get obscured in the process.

As someone who is told to download stuff for use at work, I'd be left looking like a dumb blonde trying to figure out how to do it....

Only poor designers focus on pretty. They're probably the same ones who think PSDs are a valid deliverable.

I get the feeling that the person designed that page wasn't part of the html days from back in the 90s

We see it all the time. Designers doing things because they look "pretty" instead of because they make sense.