Microsoft Silverlight

» see silverlight.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

microsoft silverlight launched on september 5, 2007. it was microsoft's bet against adobe flash. you installed a browser plug-in, and pages could run rich applications inside a sandboxed runtime that was a subset of.net. the pitch was that web designers writing xaml and c# could ship the same code into a browser and a windows desktop client (later also windows phone), while playing video that adobe could not yet play at the same quality. for a couple of years it almost worked. the 2008 beijing olympics streamed through silverlight on nbc. the 2010 vancouver olympics did the same. netflix's instant streaming product launched on silverlight as the drm layer that let the studios sign off on a browser-based player.

the strategy started failing the moment html5 video became real. by 2013 chrome and firefox were both stable enough to play protected video through encrypted media extensions without any plug-in. netflix rebuilt its player on html5 and spent the next several years migrating users off silverlight, while nbc moved its streaming feeds to other platforms. mlb.tv held on slightly longer than most. the harder cliff was npapi. chrome announced it was removing npapi plug-in support, and the deprecation completed in september 2015. firefox followed in march 2017. with both major browsers dropping the plug-in interface silverlight relied on, the runtime had nowhere to run except internet explorer and microsoft edge legacy.

the long quiet decline lasted from 2015 to 2021. microsoft kept shipping security patches for silverlight 5 because some enterprise software still used it inside ie11. internet explorer was retired in june 2022. microsoft formally ended silverlight support on october 12, 2021, with the final version frozen at 5.1.50918 from january 2019. by 2023 fewer than 0.02 percent of websites loaded silverlight on a given page, which is the web-stats version of saying nobody at all.

i installed silverlight maybe four times in my life. each install was for exactly one site that insisted on it, usually a turkish ministry payment portal or a corporate training video at a job, once for a microsoft documentation page that refused to display its embedded demo any other way. the install always asked you to restart the browser, did its thing for the one page that needed it, then sat dormant on the machine until you wiped the drive. flash was a runtime that had ten thousand things you wanted to view. silverlight was a runtime that had one thing per install, and you mostly resented the one. flash was a runtime that had ten thousand things you wanted to view. silverlight was a runtime that had one thing per install, and you mostly resented the one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

silverlight's selling point inside microsoft was that it would let.net developers reuse skills on the web. a c# developer who already knew xaml from windows presentation foundation could build browser apps. that was a real promise to the microsoft developer base in 2007, and a fraction of them moved their internal corporate apps to silverlight on the strength of it. the problem was that almost none of those apps faced the public web. the silverlight footprint outside microsoft's own enterprise customers stayed thin. flash had a decade-long head start with the tooling that designers actually used, and silverlight never closed the gap on creative tools.

~ where it actually shipped ~

the silverlight legacy almost everyone touched at least once was video drm. the studios needed a browser-side runtime that could decode protected streams without giving up the decryption keys, and silverlight's drm story was further along than flash's at the time. that was the sliver of market that mattered. netflix instant streaming used silverlight from launch in 2008 until the html5 migration completed around 2014. nbc's olympic feeds used it for two summer or winter games, and mlb.tv used it for several seasons after that. these were the most-watched moments silverlight ever powered. for almost everyone else, it was a one-off install for a single corporate page.

~ the plug-in cliff ~

the technical reason silverlight died was npapi removal. chrome announced its npapi deprecation in 2014 and finished pulling it in september 2015. firefox followed in march 2017. silverlight ran inside the browser through the netscape plugin api, the same mechanism flash and java applets used. once npapi was gone, the plug-in could not load. microsoft's own edge browser had switched to chromium by 2020, and chromium-edge could not run silverlight either. the only browser that still loaded silverlight by 2020 was internet explorer 11, kept alive on enterprise desktops for line-of-business reasons. when microsoft retired ie11 in june 2022, the last surface where silverlight could run was finally gone.

~ what got buried with it ~

silverlight took two related microsoft efforts down with it. windows phone 7 was originally built on silverlight as its app runtime. when microsoft pivoted away from silverlight, windows phone had to migrate its app model, which fragmented the small developer base it had. the second was the broader xaml-on-web idea. blazor revived parts of the pitch a decade later as a webassembly-based way to run.net in the browser, but blazor is a different runtime that does not require a plug-in install. the original silverlight bet, which was that the web should be a browser plus one extra microsoft runtime, lost to the html5 generation that decided the browser itself was the runtime.

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