Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Let Silverlight Die

I was telling my son +Galen Seaton about this idea for a blog post and he looked at me funny.  He said "Silverlight, I don't think I've ever heard of Silverlight."  Just to give you an idea, Galen is a bit of a computer geek who swaps back and forth between Linux and Windows on a computer he built for gaming.  This really made me laugh.

For the uneducated of what Silverlight is, if you take Adobe's Flashplayer, add in some special buffering capabilities, wrap a DRM controller around it, then fund it with a few billion dollars of marketing and exclusivity, you end up with Silverlight.  When Silverlight launched back in 2006, it was doomed.  Web sites such as MLB.com used Silverlight on launch day as a marketing attempt by Microsoft.  Within six months they moved back to the Flash streaming but still offered Silverlight up to those who had it installed.



Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet detailed the information where Silverlight 5 is the final chapter of this unfinished book.  This was dated back in 2011 with claims of Silverlight's demise going back as far as 2009.  Yet today we still fight with this dead media streaming software.

Over on the Linux side of the world, there is an api functional version available... albeit very dated called Moonlight.  This software uses the mono project to achieve functionality.  Mono is an open source .Net development platform by Miguel de Icaza.  The problem is, you couldn't use Moonlight for a lot of the web streaming services due to lack of DRM capabilities.  Before Moonlight could mature enough to be usable for such services like streaming Netflix, several work arounds had already been found.  The project became stagnant without full support from Microsoft and faded into history when Miguel created the company Xamarin.

What uses Silverlight


A lot of various web apps use Silverlight.  If you have a Netflix account, you have probably been asked to install Silverlight at one point.  Same deal with Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus (web).  The good news is these amazing media web streaming services have all been moving over to the industry standard HTML5.  There's one problem for those people still stuck on the now defunct Internet Explorer.  It seems IE doesn't fully support the entire toolchain of the industry standards (nothing new here).  So if you want to move away from Silverlight, you are going to have to move to a decent/better browser like Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.

There are other desktop applications which uses Silverlight unfortunately.  If you have TimeWarner cable and enjoy streaming TV Shows from the custom app they have, you will need Silverlight still.  I'm sure Comcast uses the same software.

But it's supported until 2021


A quick peek back at the official MSDN forums finds us this little tidbit: 

"If you're developing for Windows phone, then yes this is still your official development platform and your software lifecycle is so fast that the year 2021 is irrelevant.  If you are developing for anything else -- like a browser based interface -- Silverlight is as good as dead and all focus for interface development is now on HTML5. (ZDNet: Silverlight strategy direction)"

But wait, the Windows phone is still supported until 2021!  Not so fast, the latest in the rumormill from Android Headlines and TechRadar is Microsoft is going to ditch the Windows Phone platform entirely for Android devices.  This actually makes sense.  The contract Stephen Elop (former CEO of Nokia) signed is set to expire soon.  Nokia is already dabbling in the Android devices with their N1 tablet.  This is the natural progression similar to the death of many other services and platforms from Microsoft.  Silverlight can be considered officially dead.

So what's left?


There isn't much really.  Perhaps picking through the scraps at the very least.  My recommendation for you would be to remove Silverlight from your computer and see what apps are no longer functioning.  Whether those applications are online services or local applications you've installed.  What I've found from being a heavy Linux user for more than ten years; if you find an application with a dependency you can't use, there will be alternatives.

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