Can You Still Download Microsoft Silverlight?

Microsoft no longer offers Silverlight as a supported download. The product reached end of support on October 12, 2021, closing out a lifecycle that began with Silverlight 5 in 2011, and Microsoft's guidance since then has been migration, not installation. Copies of the installer that circulate on third-party download sites are unofficial, unpatched, and — critically — useless in any modern browser even if they install cleanly.

Why downloading it wouldn't help anyway

This is the part most people miss. Suppose you did obtain a Silverlight runtime installer and it ran without complaint on your Windows PC. You would still be exactly where you started, because the runtime by itself displays nothing — a browser has to load it as a plugin, and no current mainstream browser will:

• Chrome removed NPAPI plugin support entirely; the Chromium project's deprecation guide documents the phase-out through its removal in September 2015.
• Firefox dropped NPAPI plugins with Firefox 52, which its release notes describe as ending support for plugins like Silverlight and Java.
• Edge never supported the plugin model at all in its standard mode.

So the download question is a bit of a trap: the scarce item isn't the installer, it's a browser willing to talk to it. We explain that side fully in why Silverlight won't run in Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.

The risks of unofficial installers

Old runtime installers hosted on random mirror sites carry two distinct problems:

• Tampering risk. You have no reliable way to confirm a third-party copy matches what Microsoft originally shipped. Legacy "free download" sites bundling extras with abandoned software is a long-running pattern.
• Permanent unpatched status. Even a pristine copy is frozen at its final 2021 state forever. General U.S. government guidance on software lifecycle and patching treats end-of-life software as a standing risk precisely because newly discovered flaws will never be fixed. Our page on the risks of keeping Silverlight deployed covers what this means for organizations still running it.

What people are usually actually trying to do

The "download Silverlight" search almost always hides one of three real goals:

• Watch or use something on a website that demands the plugin. Check whether the site has a modern version — most rebuilt years ago — or contact its owner. The demand is nearly always a stale page, not a real requirement.
• Reach an old internal business app. This is an IT department conversation. Managed environments sometimes bridge the gap temporarily with Edge's IE mode — see does Edge's IE mode run Silverlight — while planning a real migration.
• Open an old Silverlight application file. If you've inherited a `.xap` package and want to see what's inside it, you don't need the runtime at all; see what a XAP file is and how to open one.

Bottom line

Treat Silverlight as retired software: officially out of support since October 2021, with no supported download and no browser that will run it normally. Whatever problem is prompting the search, the fix lives on the website's side or in a migration plan — not in an installer.