The need for Silverlight?

[lorraine]

Hi Gary,

What's your experience with Silverlight? I have not yet installed it and therefore have no experience with it. Other than Windows Live Photo Gallery needing it to display a slideshow (I then changed to Picasa Web Albums) I haven't found anything compelling to add another application. I have seen some people with Silverlight installed when I work on their computers but none of them even knew that they had it when I asked them about it.

I'd be interested in reading your opinion about it/experience with it, especially regarding use of system resources.

[online_fixes]

Hello Lorraine,

I use two computers with Windows 7 and one with Vista on a daily basis and I am not sure if I would miss Silverlight if it were gone.

I will disable it on all three computers tomorrow and post any changes I notice but for now I am posting some of the technical information needed to run Silverlight along with a link to much more information.

In order to view all the multimedia content and animation in all websites, you should have these add-ons installed:

Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX - for Internet Explorer

Adobe Flash Player 10 Plugin - for non-IE browsers

Java Runtime Environment

Microsoft Silverlight

I have listed system requirements for Microsoft Silverlight and associated technologies below.

Windows

Operating System: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2

Intel Pentium III 450MHz or faster processor (or equivalent)

128MB of RAM
Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich internet applications, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for most web browsers running under MS Windows. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics and animation, and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight is also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone 7.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

[lorraine]

Gary,

I use everything that you mention for viewing multimedia on websites except for Silverlight (I also don't use any Quicktime plugin) and have only found one instance so far--the Windows Live Photo Gallery--that required it. I could actually use photo gallery to view photos but it wouldn't play a slide show without it. Slide shows used to work before Microsoft changed how the photo gallery worked. That's why I took all my photos out of Windows Live Photo Gallery and switched to using a Picasa web album. It just works, slide show and all, without an additional application such as Silverlight.

I'll be interested in what you find out after disabling it.

[lorraine]

I just read that once Windows 8 comes out Mircrosoft will no longer be using Silverlight with the version of IE10 meant for Windows 8. Microsoft will ship Windows 8 with a second version of IE10 to run on the Windows 7 interface that will also be included. That version will "accommodate older plugins" but IE10 for Windows 8 will run on an interface dubbed Metro.