Windows – How to enable Silverlight in Google Chrome 42+

google-chromenpapipluginssilverlightwindows

I have Silverlight 5 installed on my Windows 8.1 64-bit computer. When I try to watch Amazon Instant Video I get a prompt telling me to install Silverlight for better quality. I also can't get Silverlight tests to run.

There's nothing wrong with my installation. I just have to use Internet Explorer for Silverlight.

Best Answer

In September 2013, Google announced its decision to move away from support for NPAPI (the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface). In Chrome 42 NPAPI is disabled by default, disallowing plugins like Silverlight and Java. Threat Report explains, "NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity."

There are other APIs that companies like Microsoft and Oracle can use to modernize their web-plugins and one can expect them to be updated to support these alternative options, but for now, as per this article from Microsoft Microsoft Silverlight may not work in recent versions of Google Chrome, you'll need to do the following:

  1. Paste this into chrome chrome://flags/#enable-npapi
  2. Select Enable
  3. When using the site, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc... you need to right click the content and click Run this Plugin
  4. (optional) laugh at Chrome for underestimating superuser