Silverlight has moved up to the next step in its evolution. As the company's Internet-centric MIX09 conference debuts in Las Vegas at the time of this article, the first taste of Silverlight 3 is available for download. Silverlight 3 is offered in Beta development stage and is designed to deliver a number of enhancements over its precursor, Silverlight 2, introduced in 2008. At the same time, the software giant applauded strong numbers for the adoption of Silverlight, as the technology is but six months away from its first two years on the market.

“In the short time since we launched Silverlight and Expression Blend, Microsoft has rapidly introduced new features and functionality that enable customers to deliver outstanding Web sites,” revealed Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft. “We are working closely with the community to deliver software that helps businesses provide customer experiences on the Web that go beyond ‘good enough’ and drive real business results.”

According to Microsoft, Silverlight 3 Beta introduces hardware-based graphics acceleration (GPU hardware acceleration), but the enhancements by no means end here. Silverlight 3 also brings to the table new codecs, including H.264. No less than 18 months have passed since Microsoft first unveiled Silverlight. In that time, the software giant accounted for in excess of 350 million installations of Silverlight. Guthrie revealed that there are now 10,000 websites that use it.

“Netflix chose Silverlight because it makes a faster and more agile development environment possible, allowing Netflix to quickly deliver a superior instant watching experience to our subscribers,” added Steve Swasey, vice president of corporate communications at Netflix. “When Netflix deployed Silverlight last fall, Netflix members realized a richer experience of access and quality to instantly watch movies and TV episodes from Netflix on their PCs and, for the first time, were able to instantly watch the same content on their Intel-based Macintosh computers.”

Silverlight 3 Beta 3 is available for download here.