Silverlight on Mac beyond 2016: Is Out Of Browser (OOB) an option?

Question

The Get Silverlight page now shows Dec 31 2016 as the end of support for Silverlight in Safari. That seems to be unannounced news and it is unclear if it was set by Apple or Microsoft. The date matches the Firefox end of support for NPAPI.

Q1: Could a Silverlight app continue to be viable (and installable) as an OOB app on the Mac beyond that? Or does the inevitable loss of broswer NPAPI support mean the complete end-of-the-line for Silverlight on Macs? The post here seems to offer some hope, but it is quite old.

Q2: Can anyone point to a source/announcement of that Safari end of support date?

Jola

No answer here... Did you get any information somewhere else? – Newcomer

No, I have not found anything more on this -- neither the OOB nor the date question. The Safari date remains the biggest non-announcement I've ever seen, but I suppose it is what people expected. – Jola

Maybe second to the non-announcement by Microsoft that Silverlight was in fact discontinued... – Newcomer

So 2017 is here, can we get some news on this hot issue? – Acth

@ValentinKuzub The latest dates I've found are posted here, but sorry - nothing new about OOB. – Jola

@IanW the oob problem is very interesting, I've created another question here #41565718 – Acth

Answer 1

I made a test to see if running an OOB Silverlight application requires a hidden browser process. On Windows and Mac, it appears that no instance of a browser is needed (no iexplore.exe appears in the Windows Task Manager, and no Safari process appears in the list given by "ps aux" on the terminal on Mac OS X).

Since we know that the installation can be done on Windows without the browser, it should work on that OS even if no browser supports Silverlight (as long as the Silverlight component itself is available to the client users).

The question that remains: can we make an installer for the Mac, so that the browser is not involved at any point in the installation process? There is a procedure to build such an installer but it requires the Silverlight application to run in the browser first, to get the ".app" file.

A possible workaround: an installer can be made while Safari still supports Silverlight. The application included in the installer will become out-of-date as its code evolves but since the installed OOB application has a build-in mecanism to update itself from the server, the latest version will be available when running it the second time. Maybe that could save us?

Newcomer

That's very helpful, although I'm getting the feeling that one should not plan on that if Mac support is absolutely needed. 2016: the year of the re-write! – Jola

I agree. We may need some time to rewrite, however, so a temporary solution can save our life. It is the case for the company where I work... As for the rewrite, I thought that developping a large application in Javascript would not be realistic; now I think it can be done. I am writing one at the moment, to learn the best practices, and I am having a pretty good time, actually. – Newcomer