How to Uninstall Silverlight

Silverlight is a web development framework. The platform is developed by Microsoft but is now reaching the end of its lifespan, with support coming to an end in late 2021.

Silverlight is stepping down as it has been largely replaced by HTML5. Even at the moment, Microsoft only supports Silverlight for Internet Explorer 11. Currently there is no support for Chrome, Firefox or any browser running on Mac. This should be enough reasons for anyone to uninstall Silverlight from their system and focus on developing experiences and applications using a different platform.

This article will give you simple steps you can follow to uninstall Silverlight from both a Windows PC and a Mac computer.

If you are uninstalling Silverlight from a Windows 10 PC, do the following:

1. Table of Contents

   Toggle

   Open your start menu and click on the Settings button that is shaped like a gear.

2. In the settings window, find and click on Apps.

3. In the list of installed applications, find and click on Silverlight.

4. Click the Uninstall button that appears next to the Silverlight entry and follow the onscreen instructions to complete the process.

You may also see an entry named "WPF/E [codename] Community Technology Preview" in your list of installed apps. If you have that, click on it and uninstall it as well, as it is part of the broader Silverlight framework.

If you are uninstalling Silverlight from a Mac computer, do the following:

1. Open your hard drive.

2. Navigate to the directory that holds your Internet plug-ins. You can find that at ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/

3. Drag and drop the following plug-ins from inside that folder into your trash:

Silverlight.plugin

WPFe.plugin

If you want to completely clean any remaining Silverlight files from your system, you may also run the following commands in a terminal window. Not all of them may be needed, depending on your Silverlight version.

rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin

rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/WPFe.plugin

rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight

rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.installSilverlightPlugin.bom

rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.installSilverlightPlugin.plist

This should take care of completely uninstalling Silverlight from both a Windows PC and a Mac.