Windows 8: The death of the silverlight framework?-unexpected continuation: it will die out for sure.

Windows 8: The death of the silverlight framework? That was the question that I asked to LI users and it triggered a great deal of debate. And now we can say for sure that Silverlight is dead , my friends. Certainly it won’t happen right now, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, as the customers won’t rush to use Windows 8 soon after its release, still there remain little time before Silverlight “passes away”. I am not happy about it, but I am also no longer in denial. In case Microsoft doesn’t change course Silverlight, as well as Flash and some other plug-in technologies, will be effectively unusable when Windows 8 is released.

On September 14th it was announced that the Metro-style browser in Windows 8 does not support plug-ins. The Metro-style browser is the full screen, chromeless implementation of Internet Explorer that most people are expected to use with Windows 8.

Dean Hachamovitch : “ For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.”

So it means no Flash, no QuickTime, no PDF readers, and no Silverlight.

Why is it so? “Metro-style browser can’t support plugins. Metro is not based on the Win32 libraries, it uses an entirely new OS-level API known as Windows Runtime or WinRT. Since the plug-ins are most likely built on Win32 components such as GDI they would have to be completely rewritten to run under Metro”.

And now let`s talk about the loses. The companies most invested in Silverlight are not loosing so much and appear to be in a rather good situation. Such companies have been adopting Silverlight, and Flex, for use in internal applications. “This sort of application generally have no HTML and simply use the browser as a delivery mechanism. As such these applications can be ported to the Metro runtime with surprisingly little effort. A new distribution mechanism will be needed, but something like the Windows app store for enterprises is undoubtedly in the works”.

The companies that will suffer most of all are those that use Flash or Silverlight to augment their websites. Since they cannot simply port their code to Metro they will need to go rewrite the components from scratch using HTML and JavaScript.

So what are your thoughts of this sad news? Is there any future now for Silverlight or Silverlight 5 will be the last major release?

Anna Kozik

Business Development Manager

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