Microsoft Releases Silverlight 5 Plug-In: Will It Be The Last?
Adobe's mobile Flash Player has seemingly passed on this year, and now
it looks like Microsoft's own Silverlight may be headed to that weird
digital graveyard in the sky, too. Rumors of Silverlight's demise have
been floating around for months now, and without a peep from Microsoft
themselves, Silverlight 5 has been released. It's a revised plug-in that
weighs in at around 7MB in size, with new features including: Hardware
Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant
performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the
GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size;
and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on
the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing
vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.
In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight. Might as well download it now; who knows if it'll be the last time you get the chance to.
