So it simply no longer makes sense to keep supporting Silverlight. IE 11 has a market share of about 1.45%, a number that’s shrinking every year. Unfortunately, that browser is Internet Explorer 11 (another relic of the past that is also currently being phased out). On October 12, 2021, the last browser that still supports Silverlight will drop support for it. Since then, it has been superseded by faster, better, more widely compatible frameworks, like HTML5. The last major version of Microsoft Silverlight was Silverlight 5, which was released in 2011. Why is Silverlight being deprecated? And what does that mean for my app? Mac OS devices followed suit in 2016, and Firefox in 2017. Browsers were also slowly phasing out the overall use of plugins to improve performance and security.īy 2015, major Silverlight users, like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, were dropping support for the framework, and Google Chrome had stopped supporting the plugin entirely. Can you imagine not having mobile web support for Android and iOS in the early 2010s?Įven worse, it peaked when the industry was transitioning to HTML5, a move that displaced even its Flashy competition. It also only ran on x86 or Windows Phone devices. The Silverlight plugin had spotty compatibility across major browsers, especially on Mac OS. It had support for many modern video codecs and was even adopted by NBC to showcase the 20 Olympics and Netflix for a few years.īut Silverlight came too late. It was positioned as an alternative to the highly dominant Adobe Flash, especially in the realm of video. Microsoft Silverlight is a development framework for rich, interactive web content.

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