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 many web 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 which 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. Over the course of about five years Microsoft released five versions: 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, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome web browsers on Microsoft Windows (except Windows RT) operating systems, with Firefox and Safari under Mac and OS X, and with mobile devices using the Windows Mobile and Symbian (Series 60) platforms. In 2013, Microsoft announced that they had ceased development on Silverlight except for patches and bugfixes. Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2012. As of 2015, Chrome no longer supports Silverlight on OS X, and will completely remove support for the current version by April 2015 on all operating systems. Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties. Silverlight is also used by Netflix for its instant video streaming service, but Netflix said in its Tech Blog in 2013 that, since Microsoft announced the end of life, they were moving to HTML5 video.