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Microsoft Silverlight |
Microsoft Silverlight is a deprecated application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, similar to Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is available for some browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics, and animation and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight is also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages that use Silverlight cannot run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there is no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.[5]
Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2012. In 2013, Microsoft announced that they had ceased development of Silverlight except for patches and bugfixes. Microsoft has set the support end date for Silverlight 5 to be October 2021.[6] Silverlight is no longer supported in Google Chrome since September 2015.[7] Since Microsoft Edge does not support plugins, it also does not support Silverlight.[8]
Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,[9] the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,[10] and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties.[11] Silverlight is also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services,[12][13] but Netflix said in its Tech Blog in 2013 that, since Microsoft had announced the end of life, they would be moving to HTML5 video.
Overview[edit]
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations, and interactivity into a single run-time environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.[15]
Silverlight supports H.264 video,[16] Advanced Audio Coding, Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and MPEG Layer III (MP3) media content[17] across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control, or Windows Media browser plug-ins. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1 standard, Silverlight also supports VC-1 video. According to the end user license agreement VC-1 and H.264 are only licensed for the "personal and non-commercial use of a consumer".[18] Silverlight makes it possible to dynamically load Extensible Markup Language (XML) content that can be manipulated through a Document Object Model (DOM) interface, a technique that is consistent with conventional Ajax techniques. Silverlight exposes a Downloader object which can be used to download content, like scripts, media assets, or other data, as may be required by the application.[19] With version 2, the programming logic can be written in any .NET language, including some derivatives of common dynamic programming languages like IronRuby and IronPython.[20]
A free software implementation (now abandoned)[21] named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, was released to bring Silverlight versions 1 and 2 functionality to Linux, FreeBSD, and other open source platforms, although some Linux distributions did not include it, citing redistribution and patent concerns.[22] However, in May 2012, Moonlight was abandoned because of its lack of popularity.[23]
Adoption[edit]
According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.16% on May 2011. Usage on July 2010 was 53.54%, whereas as of May 2011 market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.26% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.51% of browsers.[24] Support of these plugins is not mutually exclusive; one system can support all three. Not all Web sites require a browser plugin; of those that do, as of 26 August 2011, fewer than 0.3% sites used Silverlight and Java,[25] 27% used Adobe Flash,[26] although another source cites around 4% for Java.[27]
Supported platforms[edit]
Over the course of about five years Microsoft released five versions with varying platform support: The first version was released in 2007; and the fifth (and final) major version on May 8, 2012. It is compatible with later versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox web browsers on Microsoft Windows (except Windows RT) operating systems,[28] with Firefox and Safari under Mac and OS X, and with mobile devices using the Windows Mobile[29] and Symbian (Series 60)[30] platforms.
Cross platform Mozilla Firefox support for Silverlight is expected to be removed as of the end of 2016 when Mozilla removes support for NPAPI plugins,[31] bringing it in-line with the removal of NPAPI plugin support in Google Chrome.[32][33]
Desktop computers[edit]
Silverlight requires an x86 processor with Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) support. Supported processors include the Intel Pentium III and up, the AMD Athlon XP and up, and newer AMD Durons.
The following table presents an availability and compatibility matrix of Silverlight versions for various operating systems and web browsers.
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