Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich internet applications that was designed to be an alternative to Adobe Flash.
Silverlight is supported via plugin for various browsers such as Mozilla Firefox.
The application framework was initially designed to support streaming media, this has now evolved into also support multimedia, graphics, and animation in order to give developers support for common language infrastructure languages and development tools.
Although use of Silverlight it quite well spread, it is one of the application development platforms for Windows Phone, the company announced end of life for Silverlight 5 in 2012.
The end is nigh for Silverlight – but whats the exact end of life date?
The following year the company revealed that developed for it has ended, apart for
patches and bugfixes. The end date set for Silverlight 5 is October 2021.
Due to this end date Google Chrome no longer supports Silverlight. Streaming services that use the application framework such as Amazon Video and Netflix will also have to use something different.
Netflix has said that it will be moving to HTML5 video.
