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Microsoft to release Silverlight 5 soon, will probably be the last Silverlight release

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After Adobe announced their plans to stop developing Flash Player for mobile devices, we’re now hearing that Microsoft plans to do the same with their own proprietary plugin, Silverlight. If you went “Silverwhat?” then I won’t be surprised. Touted as the competitor Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight never really managed to gain the same amount of popularity among web developers.

But now it seems that won’t be an issue for long. Microsoft is on the verge of announcing the next version of Silverlight, with the beta version already having been released back in September. But according to Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet, this will probably be the last version of Silverlight.

This news is not entirely too shocking. Silverlight’s unpopularity coupled with Microsoft’s recent support for a more, plugin-free browsing experience and endorsement of HTML5 as the future of web, Silverlight was never going to last very long. Of course, Microsoft is yet to comment on the matter so one can’t be 100% sure yet but it’s not that difficult to figure out that it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft makes it official. What remains to be see is whether they will continue to support it or drop it completely.

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