Microsoft Silverlight

The Flash rival that outlived its purpose

Shut down
19902026

Silverlight was Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash, launched in 2007 and best known for powering Netflix streaming and Olympic broadcasts. Browsers abandoned plugins, HTML5 took over video, and Microsoft ended support on 12 October 2021.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2007
  2. 15 April 2007 Launch
    Silverlight 1.0 announced

    A cross-browser plugin aimed at Flash.

  3. 2008
  4. 8 August 2008 Peak
    Powers the Beijing Olympics online

    NBC's streaming showcase puts Silverlight in millions of browsers.

  5. 2010
  6. 2010 Feature
    Netflix streams on Silverlight

    The plugin becomes the backbone of legal streaming video.

  7. 2013
  8. September 2013 Decline
    Chrome begins killing NPAPI plugins

    The delivery mechanism itself becomes unsupported.

  9. 2015
  10. 2 July 2015 Shutdown announced
    Microsoft points developers to HTML5

    Official guidance moves off the plugin.

  11. 2021
  12. 12 October 2021 Shutdown
    Support ends

    The last plugin era product from Microsoft is retired.

The site through time

Browse microsoft.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019 2021 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Microsoft 2007–2021 Founded

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Microsoft ended Silverlight support on 12 October 2021; the plugin had already been abandoned by every browser except Internet Explorer 11 after Microsoft encouraged a move to HTML5 in 2015.

Our analysis: Silverlight was a good answer to a question the web stopped asking. It won real ground in video streaming (Netflix, the Olympics) just as HTML5 video, the iPhone and Chrome's plugin purge made browser plugins unacceptable. Microsoft itself moved Netflix off it and told developers to use HTML5.

History [edit]

Microsoft's turn at the plugin

Silverlight shipped in April 2007 as a cross-browser plugin for rich media and applications, aimed straight at Flash: better video quality, smooth adaptive streaming and, unusually, the ability to write browser code in C# instead of JavaScript. Developers who lived in Visual Studio loved that last part.

For a few years it had real wins. Netflix streamed through Silverlight for most of a decade. NBC used it for the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics. Amazon Video and many broadcasters followed, largely because its DRM was what the studios would accept.

Deprecated by everything at once

Then the ground moved. The iPhone never allowed plugins. HTML5 video plus Encrypted Media Extensions gave browsers native, DRM-capable playback. Chrome dropped NPAPI plugin support in 2015, Firefox followed, and Microsoft's own Edge never supported Silverlight at all. In July 2015 Microsoft published guidance encouraging developers to move to HTML5; Netflix completed its own migration around the same period.

Silverlight limped on inside Internet Explorer 11 and enterprise line-of-business apps, and Microsoft set its final end-of-support date at 12 October 2021. It died as a footnote in the same extinction event that took Flash, Java applets and Shockwave: the era when the browser stopped needing anyone's plugin.

Similar projects

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Sources [edit]

  1. Silverlight End of Support Microsoft 12 October 2021 [archived]
  2. Microsoft Silverlight support ends October 12, 2021: here is what you need to know gHacks 16 September 2021 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).