Microsoft Silverlight is a plugin that enables your Internet browser to display a wide variety of dynamic content. If you have downloaded Microsoft Silverlight, it may not be enabled in your browser of choice.

Credit: • • • Netflix-loving Chrome users won’t be caught in a bind come January 1, which is when Google is set to turn off support for Silverlight and similar plugins: Netflix has already “100 percent switched over” to HTML5 for current Chrome versions, according to a spokesperson. That it will disable Silverlight and other plugins based on the NPAPI plugin architecture by default at the beginning of next year. These plugins were originally developed to extend the functionality of browsers. For example, [company]Google[/company] installed its own Google Talk plugin on Chrome and other browsers to bring voice and video chat to Gmail. Silverlight, which was developed by Microsoft, was meant to offer media streaming in the browser.

Usage of these plugins has continued to decline as services transition to HTML5-based solutions, but Silverlight in particular has still seen quite a bit of usage. Eleven percent of all Chrome users still launched Silverlight in October 2014, according to Google. That’s down from 15 percent a year ago, but still significant, and largely based on users viewing [company]Netflix[/company] streams in their browser. Netflix itself has been transitioning to HTML5 for some time, and actually this summer as well.

On Chrome, Netflix started to move toward HTML5 in early 2013, in part to ensure playback on Chromebooks because there is no Silverlight implementation for Chrome OS., the company still uses a dedicated plugin for DRM, but this won’t be impacted by the NPAPI phase-out. For consumers, all of this means that their Netflix streams will continue to work on Chrome even after January 1. All they need to do is keep their Chrome browser up to date.

I've twice had OSX crash on me while streaming Netflix on my MacBook, once each on Firefox and Safari. The video begins to skip while the audio continues (unlike when my internet slows, and everything stalls). It will usually continue on just fine, but as stated, I've twice gotten the kernel panic 'You need to restart your computer' message. I've found that I haven't received the message if I pause the movie for a few moments when it starts to skip, but does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?

I've twice had OSX crash on me while streaming Netflix on my MacBook, once each on Firefox and Safari. The video begins to skip while the audio continues (unlike when my internet slows, and everything stalls). Filezilla for mac book pro. It will usually continue on just fine, but as stated, I've twice gotten the kernel panic 'You need to restart your computer' message. I've found that I haven't received the message if I pause the movie for a few moments when it starts to skip, but does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?