What is Silverlight ?
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications for the Web. The Silverlight browser plug-in is freely available for all major browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Apple'a Safari and Windows Internet Explorer running on the Macintosh or Microsoft Windows.
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, but not for Chrome due to Silverlight's use of the NPAPI framework. 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.
Silverlight development has officially been shelved by Microsoft, although security patches and bugfixes for it will be extended until, I believe, 2021. This has forced Netflix to start looking for an alternative (probably HTML5) and those of you that use Netflix will no doubt be kept informed of future streaming technology developments.
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