Silverlight support ending next month

Microsoft Silverlight

Another one bites the dust! If you use the Microsoft Silverlight to build web applications, then you might want to know that the company is ending support for the platform next month.

October 12, 2021 to be exactly.

Released all the way back in 2007, the legacy framework is only currently supported on Internet Explorer. Redmond last released an update for the platform almost three years ago, and the writing has been on the wall since then.

A reminder:

Of course, fans of the Windows Phone platform may recall that Silverlight 4 was the primary development platform for the mobile OS. And we all know what happened to that. Even Netflix transitioned from Silverlight to HTML in 2013, and the pieces have since then been aligning.

In terms of browser support, Edge only supports Silverlight in the IE mode, Google Chrome said goodbye back in September 2015, and Mozilla Firefox took the same decision in March of 2017.

If you would like more information on the sunset, then Microsoft has a dedicated Silverlight portal that has a banner notifying about the end of support.

The company also points to a support document that may be of interest.

Redmond will continue to provide technical assistance to customers using Silverlight 5 only until the retirement date. This includes paid support for Silverlight applications running on Internet Explorer 11 on a range of operating platforms.

And although the last web browser that currently supports Microsoft Silverlight, IE 11, is itself being phased out, the software titan confirms that Silverlight apps will continue to work in the IE mode in Edge.