Netflix's shift from Silverlight to HTML5, said McGuire, is proof of that maturation. 'HTML5 has matured to the point where most in the industry are moving to it.' 'Moving to HTML5 is important to someone like Netflix, which wants to be as platform agnostic as possible,' said Mike McGuire, an analyst with Gartner. Some users, especially those running Macs, have also criticized Silverlight for hogging their machines' processors, slowing other tasks to a crawl or making their systems overheat. Mozilla's Firefox, while not going that far, now automatically blocks all plug-ins except for Adobe's Flash Player, making the user 'click-to-play' a plug-in. Microsoft, for example, has banned plug-ins from Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on Windows RT, the scaled-down edition aimed at tablets, and on the 'Modern' user interface (UI), formerly known as 'Metro,' on Windows 8.

Park and Watson defended the switch to HTML5 with well-worn arguments, including distrust of plug-ins on security grounds, but they also pointed out that browsers, even on the desktop, are shifting to a no-plug-in model. Although the technology was used by NBC to stream the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2010 Winter Olympics, the network switched to Google-owned YouTube to provide the streaming infrastructure for last year's London Games.

Netflix is one of the largest licensees of Silverlight, and among the few major services that still rely on it. As the two noted, Microsoft has said it will support the Silverlight 5 browser plug-in until Oct.

Silverlight for mac netflix