At its recent Professional Developer Conference Microsoft’s Bob Muglia signalled a major change of strategy for the company’s Silverlight technology. When first introduced Silverlight was intended to become a near universal cross-platform web runtime like Flash. Now Muglia revealed that Microsoft saw HTML5 as the future for universal in-browser development while Silverlight was being repositioned as a native application development platform for Windows Phone 7 devices. Unsurprisingly, most pundits saw this as an admission of defeat, with our own Jon Honeyball asking: “Silverlight RIP?”
Maximum PC: Microsoft will not support its own Silverlight web plug-in in Edge, the next generation browser that was formerly known as Project Spartan. Instead, the company is going all-in with HTML5 specifications, the company confirmed in a blog post.
Chrome 42, released to the stable channel today, will take a big step toward pushing old browser plugins, including Java and Silverlight, off the Web. Those plugins use a 1990s-era API called NPAPI ("Netscape Plugin API") to extend the browser, and with Chrome 42, that API is now off by default.
InfoQ- Stating that “NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity”, Google has announced that it intends to remove the Netscape Plug-in API. Also known as NPAPI, this is the plug-in technology used host application runtimes such as Silverlight, Java, and Unity. They are beginning the process in January by disabling all plugins not a small whitelist.
I use Firefox as well, but applaud them with this. Java is annoying as hell, never functions, and should be considered a virus.....
