Hello all, as you are probably well aware, Silverlight wont install in [your favorite browser] so you’ve been frantically looking for an answer. Well, I am just a highschooler (so take this with a grain of salt), but heres what ive been able to figure out:
MS Silverlight is old. Apparently, while supported 'till 2020, Silverlight was end-of-life in 2013. Also, silverlight belongs to a family of plugins called NPAPI.
These are slowly being phased out of modern browsers (I can only speak for firefox and chrome, although, ive heard that MS Edge doesnt even support NPAPI plugins) form what I can gather, there is no way (in current versions of firefox and chrome) to enable NPAPI plugins.
I do, however, have a workaround for firefox users, as thats my favoite browser, im sure this post will be useful to chrome users, but you will have to find your own solutions. On to the workaround:
Mozilla has a ESR (Extended Support Release) (also, you can download it Here.) That, should be supported 'till late 2018 (Lets take to the forums before then). There is a way to run 2 versions of firefox at the same time. I pulled these instructions out of Mozilla’s forums, while its not going to hold your hand, it should point you in the right direction:
The info from the 3 year old post is still valid. Following trails begun there I...
1. Opened Firefox 1 with the -profilemanager command line switch
2. I renamed the current profile to "Plex".
3. I created a new profile named "Regular".
4. I started Firefox 1 with the new profile "Regular".
5. I closed firefox 1 and manually copied everything from the "Plex" profile folder into the "Regular" profile folder. (Replacing/Overwriting everything)
6. I downloaded "Firefox Setup 55.0.exe" and manually extracted the "Core" folder with Winrar.
(Go here https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ and click on the "Firefox for other platforms & Languages" to get the full offline installer package)
7. I created a new folder in "program files" (not program files (x86)) and named it Mozilla Firefox.
8. I moved everything from the "Core" folder I extracted from the archive into the new "mozilla Firefox" folder.
9. I created a custom shortcut "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" -P Plex -no-remote and named it plex and changed the icon to the one from the plex executable. (Firefox 1)
10. I created another shortcut "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" -P Regular (Firefox 2)
11. I started Firefox 2 with the second shortcut from #10 and set it to the default browser.
12. I then stated the 2nd instance of Firefox (Firefox 1) with the shortcut from #9 and told it not to be the default browser and not to check this setting on start up.
Now I have Firefox 32bit v54.0.1 (set to never update) for running my media front end and Firefox 64bit v55 (That I will keep updates current on) for accessing the internet and can run both at the same time.
Offline installer for Firefox: Here (I extracted with 7zip)
Link to see if silverlight works Here
Alright! If all goes well, you should have 2 separate “environments” for firefox. Whilst its outside of lab hours right now, I can confirm MS Silverlight working on my ‘ESR Firefox’, Will update if I can get the web config tomorrow. (I see no reason that I should not)
For chrome, and others, I assume you should be able to track down an earlier version that supports NPAPI plugins and do something similar, just dont make it your daily driver!
Best of luck to you!