Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe's runtime environment, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.
Microsoft terminated support for Silverlight on Internet Explorer 11 (the last remaining web browser still supporting it) on October 12, 2021.
History
Introduction
From its initial launch in 2007, reviewers compared the product to Adobe's Flash Player.
Adoption
According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage in July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas as of May 2011, market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers. Support of these plugins is not mutually exclusive; one system can support all three.
Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties. Silverlight was also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services, but Netflix said in its Tech Blog in 2013 that, since Microsoft had announced Silverlight's end-of-life, they would be moving to HTML video. Despite this, Netflix continued to support Silverlight playback for browsers that did not support HTML5 until September 13, 2023.
Demise
Industry observers announced the death of Silverlight as early as 2011. In 2012, Microsoft deprecated Silverlight for HTML5 in Windows 8, but until 2015, it was not clear what Microsoft's official position was on Silverlight's future. In July 2015, a Microsoft blog post clarified that, "… we encourage companies that are using Silverlight for media to begin the transition to DASH/MSE/CENC/EME based designs".
Microsoft planned to terminate Silverlight support on October 12, 2021. Support for IE7–8 was removed between 2014 and 2016, depending on the OS. Support for IE9 and IE10 has also ended "or though [sic] the support lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter." There is no Silverlight plugin available for Microsoft Edge Legacy or newer. It has not been supported by Google Chrome since September 2015 or by Firefox since March 2017.
Since late 2023, less than 0.02% of sites used Silverlight, less than 1.3% used the also discontinued Adobe Flash Player, and less than 0.03% use Java client-side (while less than 4.7% use Java server-side).
Overview
Silverlight provides a graphical system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation, and combines multimedia, graphics, animation andinteractivity in one software platform. It was designed to work with XAML and with .NET languages. XAML is used to mark up pages that use vector graphics and animation. The text contained in Silverlight applications is available for search engines, since it is not compiled, but is available in the form of XAML. Silverlight can also be used to create widgets for Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista.
Silverlight can play WMV, WMA and MP3 for all supported browsers without requiring additional components such as Windows Media Player. Since Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the SMPTE VC-1 standard, Silverlight supports VC-1 video only inside the ASF container. In addition, the license agreement says that VC-1 is allowed to use only for personal, non-commercial purposes ("personal and non-commercial use of a consumer"). Silverlight allows you to dynamically load XML and use the DOM to interact with it in the same way that it is done in Ajax. Silverlight contains a Downloader object, through which you can download scripts, media files, etc., if necessary to the application. Starting with version 2.0, the program logic can be described in any of the .NET languages, including dynamic programming languages such as Iron Ruby and Iron Python, which in turn are executed in DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), rather than CLR (Common Language Runtime ).
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