Silverlight in Windows 8, 10: All You Need to Know

There are also some problems when installing Silverlight caused by your antivirus, so make sure you allow Silverlight access and if it still does not run, try to deactivate the antivirus temporarily until the installation is complete. While we are on this subject, make sure you set your antivirus to allow Silverlight to access the Internet and download future updates. A lot of people are talking about Silverlight’s compatibility with Windows 8 and are asking for feedback regarding that. Since both Windows 8 and Silverlight are being sold by Microsoft, there shouldn’t be much to discuss on this topic, however there are some issues present here. Click Update Drivers to get new versions and avoid system malfunctionings.

When people call a technology “dead”, what they often really mean is “stable” and “mature”. It hasn’t had any meaningful new features for years. It does what it does well enough, and if Microsoft were still actively trying to shoehorn new features into it that would be a bad thing. After a while, what is needed is not new features, but a new development paradigm. Apparently you will be able to make stuff for this new touch interface with HTML5 and JavaScript.

They are extremely popular and are written with Flash. And I don’t see how they could be written without it. As far as I know, fetching Javascript from a remote server and blindly letting it do whatever it wants is a very bad idea. With Flash, the application is sandboxed, and thus, it would be harder to compromise a system this way, and developers with genuine What is DevOps automation goals won’t need to go through a daunting bureaucratic process for approving their application. The majority of our users are IE7/IE8/IE9, we get about 6000 visitors a day. Even if the majority were Chrome, Firefox or Opera (we had a few hundred Opera users, I don’t even bother supporting those), all those browsers support flash in Windows and MacOSX.

According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage on 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. I have had the superb pleasure of working on several Windows 8 Enterprise LOB Metro apps for proof-of-concept, along with some very talented internal developers/designers.

  • You can continue developing the way you do today, and if you want to start building Metro applications, you’ve already got most of the skills needed.
  • Silverlight sites can’t strut their stuff in Windows RT or the Metro part of Win8, no matter how hard you try.
  • Every up to date major browser exudes HTML5 support.
  • If they don’t open their technologies like Net.Framework and start working towards multiplatform solutions not only Windows, but all their software stack will go down eventually.

That old machine ran in just 64K words or memory, and implemented “Metro” in my opinion, better than MS can do today, almost 30 years later. So I don’t know if this article means that Flash and Silverlight are not installed by default or if plugins are not supported at all. That’s why they upload HTML5 videos on their “building Windows 8” blog. And that’s why, if I want to watch those videos full screen, I first have to download them and open them with a native media player… bringing back memories. Different file formats could be supported using codecs without a unique plug-in.

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What does C/C++ (or C# or whatever) has to do with it? So far JavaScript is the only de-facto ubiquitous Web scripting language which browsers support. Handling Authentication and Authorization in Microservices Part 2 Great news, regardless of whether Flash is even a good technology or not. The web should be free from plugins and other proprietary technology.

silverlight windows8

It’s apparent that Silverlight will be a supported part of the Windows environment for the forseeable future. I installed Silverlight, but for some reason it doesn’t work and Silverlight contents never show up. I tried to install it once again and I get a message saying that it’s already installed. Time-saving software and hardware expertise that helps 200M users yearly. Guiding you with how-to advice, news and tips to upgrade your tech life. Since the beta of IE10 running on the Consumer Preview’s Metro side wouldn’t run Flash animations on any site, many observers figured Microsoft had followed in Apple’s footsteps and banished Flash, albeit only in Metro.

Is Silverlight supported on Windows 8?

Whether you like Flash or hate it, this probably will be a final true test. If Flash survives because the users will work around artificial obstacles, it How To Become A User Interface UI Designer 2022 Update will only get stronger. Microsoft will choke on WebGL since they always considered OpenGL their rival. So far their support of HTML5 is far from perfect.

I know you know this, I’ve seen your posts, you aren’t stupid, though you seem to be pretending here. The controls from the UI for Silverlight suite support different themes. You can see how to apply a theme different than the default one in the Setting a Theme help article. Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned.

Mono Moonlight implementation

Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe’s runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. 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. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 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”.

silverlight windows8

You can then use essentially the same HTML5 streaming software, just pointed at a different source video file in each case. When that happens, Google may at that point direct YouTube to “throw the big switch” and change over to primarily WebM, with Flash fallback still supported for a while. YouTube will point out that after all, Microsoft is dropping support for Flash, so YouTube should as well. The first version of Android to support WebM was Gingerbread. It will be a while before Gingerbread or later is on most Android phones.

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All the browsers will continue to use flash, it’s not going the way of the Dodo any time soon. I’m a bit confused here – has Flash ever actually shipped with Windows? Maybe some OEM installs put it in, but I think the retail versions of Windows haven’t had as far as I know. Perhaps the change here is that MS is actively discouraging OEMs from pre-installing Flash – it’s not very clear to me at all.

I pity those poor souls who thought to embrace Mono/C# as a way to cross platform support. Yep, Flash will become a cross platform development tool. Actually you can compile your flash app into a iOS app with relative ease. Adobe simply bundles a version of the AIR run time with each app. A tad inefficient in terms of app size, but it works, and Apple’s policy reversal on non-native apps allows it.

Now the messages are clearer, and it’s apparent that Silverlight will be a supported part of the Windows environment for the foreseeable future. But at the same time, the new Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 doesn’t allow plug-ins. The version of IE 10 in the desktop mode of Windows 8 lets plug-ins run just fine. Silverlight has been used less and less in the past few years and Netflix was the last major site to use it. Silverlight will still be supported on Windows until 2020, but it will get close to no attention in the upcoming years.

But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it. And now, Mary Jo Foley from our sister site ZDNet is urging Microsoft to make sure the platform comes back into the discussion, and soon. Former CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don’s work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications. Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Why developer experience is the key to better software, straight from the…