With Silverlight disappearing from Chrome 45, what are my alternatives?

Question

Since Chrome 45 will drop NPAPI support in september and with it Silverlight, what would be my alternatives beside using another browser ? I would really need to still support Chrome with my application and can't force the user to not update their main browser.

Could I use a chrome extension ?

Could I make them install an out of date Chrome alongside an updated one ?

What else ?

Keith

Facing same situation =/ – Carburet

We are sticking with IE and Firefox. After the recent update from MSFT, Chrome stopped the supporting silverlight completely. – Accumulation

@DanielHerr We are already rewriting the application to drop Silverlight, but it won't be ready in September – Keith

@smorgan I want to be able to continue to run my application until we finish refactoring it, which won't be ready in September. How could one run a Silverlight application if the only browser available is Chrome ? – Keith

By the way, would people down voting this be kind enough to explain why ? – Keith

I explained why I downvoted your question: 'what's an alternative to Silverlight' is a question too broad to answer, since it sounds like you are asking what an alternative technology to implement something would be without saying the something is. If what you are asking is actually, 'How do I run Silverlight in Chrome once NPAPI support is removed from Chrome' you should edit it to make that clear. – Adis

You should still be able to enable it afterwards, just plop this into the chrome address bar chrome://flags/#enable-npapi and click "Enable" under NPAPI – Bohaty

@ChrisW. I believe that this option is only available until September 2015, I will keep it in mind though. – Keith

Ah I thought I read somewhere it will remain, since the plugins remain installed just disabled in chrome explicitly, guess we'll find out. It's always lovely being at the mercy of the corporations lol :) – Bohaty

@ChrisW.-- Nope, vendors and even the Chromium projects say we only have until Chrome 44; Silverlight support (general npapi support) will be removed from 45 in September 2015 chromium.org/developers/npapi-deprecation – Trilateral

Some of us in the corporate and government world have to continue supporting non-html 5 compliant browsers (IE 7-9, anyone?), so migrating to a javascript solution is not as easy. I don't know if I'll even have approval to start working on it before September. – Trilateral

XAML for HTML5 looks promising, though they still seem far from being feature complete. – Fantinlatour

Possible duplicate of Silverlight not working with chrome – Mcgowen

Answer 1

Well it seems there is a solution ! I have tried IETab with Chrome Canary (v45) and the dev channel (v46) and even with Silverlight support dropped from those version, the extension allows my application to work flawlessly !

I have reached the support of IETab and they have confirmed Silverlight will continue to work with their plugin when Chrome officialy release version 45.

Try it out : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ie-tab/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd?hl=en

EDIT : As of today, September 3 2015, Chrome 45 is out and IETab still works.

Keith