Microsoft has quietly released the latest major version of Silverlight. In a blog post, the company calls it “part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices” and notes that the plug-in is under 7MB in size.
New features in version 5 largely centre around improved performance, including “Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU”. The new plug-in also extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser, which, according to Microsoft’s press release, means “users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight”.