Browser-laptop: Silverlight is a "desired extension"?

[vgturtle127]

I recently read the desired extensions page on the Wiki, and I saw something somewhat alarming.

First of all, Silverlight to my knowledge is not currently maintained by Microsoft, and they have stated themselves that they do not plan on maintaining it and as such don't recommend anybody use it. Other web browsers besides Internet Explorer have completely dropped plugin support (non-Flash plugins, anyway), so in the long run I think this should be removed.

If we try to support it, it will just be a big mess of trying to get an old plugin working on a browser platform that doesn't support plugins, hacking it to work, then suffering from many reports, yada yada yada.

As a developer, I have always tried to axe support for legacy and unmaintained software ASAP, like Java, Silverlight, QuickTime, Shockwave (different from Flash), Adobe Flash, etc. Having used many technologies and developed with many of the web software mentioned, I can tell you that most of it is really not worth it now that we have HTML5 and JavaScript. Not that we didn't have JavaScript before, but you know what I mean.

Basically, this is a bad idea in many ways. Security being a large factor, since Silverlight was heavily targeted due to the fact that it had basically worked the same way as Flash (which is also going to be dropped by most browsers this year). Web-based attacks and plugin exploits are numerous and severe nowadays.

Privacy would be an issue as well, due to the fact that Silverlight still does all the same things it use to, even though it has been somewhat shut down. It still leaks data, and it still uses a lot of resources.

Performance could suffer, mostly because plugin support kind of inherently does that, because plugins were designed for a different age, but also because they just are resource hogs, doing things like media decoding and hardware acceleration.

Usability could suffer, because we would need to supply the same things other browsers did to accommodate for it.

I could go on, but the point is we should focus on support for things that have a future, like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebExtensions, etc.

Let's at least discuss this before we add support, I'm not sure if there are legitimate reasons for having Silverlight installed in 2017, but if you have one, please inform me.

Thanks for listening. :+1:

[luixxiul]

First let me say that Silverlight was added there on 25 Oct 2016 by a user, not the team.

• https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Desired-extensions/_history
• https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Desired-extensions/9a258220d359a39464a45d63bb11d26c7db824ed

I think the request itself is invalid because Silverlight is not an extension but a plugin. Because Silverlight is not listed here and Java will not be supported, I assume Silverlight will also not be supported.

CC @bbondy for a canonical answer.

I changed the header on the Wiki page based on your feedback: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Desired-extensions/_compare/ff8546022adf70d04d8a65702af1d38d44b4c1d2...eb5168dcce8aafe680c0daa565118ead046b0d9e

[vgturtle127]

@luixxiul Alright, good to hear most plugins won't be supported since they aren't supported by the people who created them or by other browsers anyway.

Could we add a place to suggest extensions and a place only developers can access that would be the list of planned supported extensions?

[luixxiul]

I think you would like to have a look at https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/1. The page is editable only for the team members.

You can freely suggest extensions on this Wiki page: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Desired-extensions

[vgturtle127]

@luixxiul Ah, thank you! I didn't realize all that was in the projects section.

[diracdeltas]

We have no plans to support silverlight or any more plugins AFAIK. (plugins as opposed to extensions)

[vgturtle127]

@diracdeltas Good to have it confirmed by somebody else in addition. Thank you.

[luixxiul]

Closed as the question was answered.