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I'm having updtged Chrome and i have installed Silverlight and it is not working. I have tried to reinstall Silverlight, looked at chrome:plugins and I cant find it there. I have restarted my machine several times over and it just wont work.

But the same time Silverlight is working fine in IE11.

Xan
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Bala Kumar
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    This is off-topic here. You may have more luck at [su]. However, spoiler, NPAPI is deprecated and there's nothing you can do. – Xan Apr 27 '15 at 14:08

3 Answers3

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Chrome no longer supports Silverlight. Rather, Chrome no longer supports the underlying protocol that Silverlight relies on, NPAPI. At the moment they have just disabled NPAPI, You can reenable it by:

  1. Entering chrome://flags/#enable-npapi in Chrome's address bar

  2. Clicking 'enable' under 'Enable NPAPI'

  3. Clicking the 'relaunch now' button.

Once you do that, the Silverlight plugin will be available again in the plugins section (along with many other plugins). This is only a temporary solution, however, as they plan on removing that option entirely by, I believe, September.

I have read elsewhere (see this article by Chris Merriman) that Microsoft's response was that there are other Silverlight capable browser alternatives to Chrome. I think you can take that to mean that Microsoft has no intention of creating a new Silverlight plugin for Chrome that does not rely on NPAPI. In other words, Chrome will likely never support Silverlight again.

NPAPI was completely removed from Chrome in version 45 released on Sept. 1st 2015. It is no longer possible to run Silverlight (or any other plug-ins that rely on NPAPI) in Chrome.

double-beep
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Jason Boyd
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My workaround is to user a chrome plugin called IETab. https://stackoverflow.com/a/32362035/2528023

The plugin : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ie-tab/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd?hl=en

Since it is now impossible to run Silverlight in Chrome, this plugin seems to embed IE inside a chrome tab, which then allow Silverlight to run. It can be useful if you are stuck with using Chrome for business reasons.

Community
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Simon ML
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Microsoft tells us :

When you use Google Chrome (version 42.0 or later) to access a website that runs Microsoft Silverlight, you see that some content is missing or that the Install Microsoft Silverlight badge is displayed. When you reinstall Silverlight, the issue still occurs.

... and ...

This issue occurs because these versions of Chrome block Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) plugins from being displayed in the browser. Silverlight is an NPAPI plugin.

... and ...

To work around this issue on versions 42 to 44 of Chrome, follow these steps:

  1. On the address bar in Chrome, type chrome://flags/#enable-npapi.
  2. In the Enable NPAPI Mac, Windows box, click Enable.
  3. Exit and then restart Chrome.
  4. Reopen the Silverlight page.
  5. Right-click the broken puzzle piece image, and then select Run this Plugin.

... and ...

On Chrome version 45 or a later version of Chrome, there is no workaround for this issue. You must use a browser that supports Silverlight content to access a Silverlight page.

So, from Chrome 45 onwards, it is no longer possible to run Silverlight in Chrome. Google has no plans to change this decision and FireFox is likely to follow this decision, some time in 2016.

John Slegers
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