The browser plug-in brings performance improvements

Dec 10, 2011 11:48 GMT  ·  By

The gold version of Silverlight 5 was just made available for download, after being expected

to make an official appearance in November.

Microsoft has just announced that the plug-in was released to manufacturers. The software is available for download on the web as well.

Released on December 9th, the new Silverlight 5 is available as a free download that weighs in at 7 MB, and which should be easily installed on Windows and Mac machines.

The technology is available with support for web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari.

The new version of Silverlight 5 comes with features such as Hardware Decode of H.264 media, along with improved graphics stack with 3D support, and more.

There are performance improvements that all systems will benefit from, along with better text support, improved media support, and a series of enhancements brought to the building of applications.

“New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU,” Microsoft explains.

The company also notes that Silverlight 5 brings “Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.”

Moreover, the new flavor of the plug-in brings the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser, something that never happened before.

“These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight,” Microsoft explains.

You can download the gold flavor of Microsoft Silverlight 5 from Softpedia via this link.

The latest version of the Silverlight SDK is available here.