Party’s over: Microsoft Silverlight support ends on October 12, 2021
Mark your calendars.
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What you need to know
Soon, the only light Microsoft Silverlight will see is the light at the end of the tunnel. As of October 12, 2021, no more than seven days afterMicrosoft officially welcomesWindows 11into the world, it will drop Silverlight like a sack of potatoes and cease support operations.
In case you’re not familiar with Microsoft Silverlight, it’s a framework for web app development built for rich web applications. Think Adobe Flash. Currently, it’s only supported on Internet Explorer 11, which isdue for retirement in 2022.
Wondering what web apps ran on Silverlight? Well,Netflix, for a time. That should give you an idea of the framework’s previous place in the world that it’s soon to no longer be a supported part of.
If you want the full details on Silverlight’s October retirement, check outMicrosoft’s support doc. It lists many nuggets of useful information, such as that past October 12, the Silverlight installer will no longer be available to download (so if you want it, now’s the time). And given that it only runs in IE11, that means that oncethatMicrosoft product is retired, your primary means of utilizing Silverlight will be through Microsoft Edge’s Internet Explorer mode.
In that sense, Silverlight will live on; it just won’t be in a state that’s much different than death given how sequestered to a singular corner of most people’s web activities it’ll be. If you check out the dedicatedMicrosoft Silverlight site, you can see the big end-of-days banner at the top of the screen.
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Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He’s a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author ofCold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.
