I also like Silverlights way of handling scrubbing thru a movie.Īnd, as others have pointed out, it looks like Microsoft has depreciated Silverlight in favor of supporting the industry-adopted h.264. Namely, not only the ability to throttle down due to bandwidth congestion, but more importantly the ability to throttle back up as congestion loosens. Speaking objectively, Silverlight does have some really nice features that are unmatched by Flash or Quicktime. (And, as you can guess, DRM was required by the movie studios so that Netflix didn’t turn into a movie-downloading site). Netflix chose Silverlight because at the time it was the only cross-platform codec that supported DRM at the time. (You can physically remove plugins by looking here: ‘/Library/Internet Plugins/’ and here: ‘/Users/YourUsername/Library/Internet Plugins/’).
As is “best practice”, I run with as few plugins as possible, as each one represents a real or potential security hole.
Like most people here, I too hate that we’re required to have Silverlight install, just because of Netflix.
