Sound familiar? It's the same problem we have with IE 6 right now. What's cheaper? Getting developers to upgrade old technologies to new ones, or just telling users not to use that latest IE/Firefox/Chrome release? Which option will most corporate enterprise IT departments pick? You can always upgrade your application to the latest version of Silverlight, which probably does have a plugin.

This means that if you have a production application running Silverlight 2.0 right now, you're relying on Microsoft releasing Silverlight 2.0 plugins for every new browser, from now until your application is retired, in order for the application to work. But how long will they be able to keep this up? If IE 10 includes a new plugin engine, I'd expect a new Silverlight plugin for Silverlight 4.0, but what about 2.0? At their current rate of release, by the time Silverlight 6 comes out, will Microsoft even be able to afford to test 6 different Silverlight releases across 3-4 different browsers? Silverlight 1.0 applications won't work in Chrome, but no one ever used Silverlight 1.0, so that's OK. Right now the support matrix isn't too bad. When Chrome, IE or Firefox re-write their plugin systems, Microsoft (or Novell) will have to release new plugins for those old Silverlight releases.

When new versions of Silverlight are released, Microsoft (and Novell) have to release new plugins for each of the major browsers. Let me play out a scenario I've been thinking about.

In the 'should I use HTML or Silverlight' debate, one thing that's overlooked is the impact that future browser releases will have on whether your application will still work in 5 or 10 years time. The text is preserved here for posterity. This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work.

Silverlight not working in chrome 2015