No Silverlight 5 Yet, No ETA Either

November is over and Microsoft did not deliver to its promise to make Silverlight 5 available, nor did the company offer specific info on when the technology might be ready.

Of course, the RC version of Silverlight 5 is out since September, but the gold flavor of the plug-in is still unavailable on the web.

Earlier this fall, a Microsoft official said that the company was on track to make the Web version of Silverlight 5 available before the end of November.

However, that obviously did not happen, and it appears that Microsoft is not getting nearer to an actual availability date either.

A Microsoft spokesperson said yesterday that Silverlight 5 still wasn’t finalized, Mary-Jo Foley states in a recent article on ZDNet.

Apparently, the Redmond-based company is set to announce more on the matter in the coming weeks. Silverlight 5 will still be out soon, but no specific details on when that should happen emerged.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, formerly the head of Microsoft’s Silverlight team, said in late October that the company was set to make it available the next month.

The new flavor of the browser plug-in should include a number of 40 new features, such as rich-media additions, general performance enhancements, and more.

The Web, desktop and mobile development platform is also expected to bring along enterprise-app-specific updates.

In addition to announcing the release of Silverlight 5, Microsoft is also expected to unveil some more details on its plans for the technology.

Rumor has it that this might be the last major release that the software giant plans for the technology, although there might be smaller version updates released at some point in the future.

With Adobe announcing plans to discontinue the development of Flash Player for mobile browsers and to support HTML5 moving forth, it would not come too much as a surprise if Microsoft made a similar move.

As Mary-Jo Foley notes, Microsoft is also stressing on the fact that HTML5/JavaScript/CSS can prove great for the development of Windows 8 applications, yet that does not mean that Silverlight is dead, the same as Flash on PCs isn’t either.

Silverlight 5 RC is available for download on Softpedia via this link.