Silverlight Install Base - How big is it?

Question

Silverlight v2.0 is getting closer and closer to RTM but I have yet to hear any stats as to how many browsers are running Silverlight. If I ask Adobe (by googling "Flash install base") they're only too happy to tell me that 97.7% of browsers are running Flash player 9 or better.

Not that I believe everything I read, but where are these statistics from Microsoft or some other vendor about Silverlight? I'm going to be making a technology choice soon and a little bit of empirical evidence would be an asset at this point...

All you Silverlight developers out there, show me your stats!

Answer 1

If you are developing something for a general audience, I would highly recommend against Silverlight as you immediately cut out Linux users.

I went to watch videos for the Olympics (and I run exclusively Linux), and I couldn't watch the video on their site because they were in Silverlight. On top of that, they actively removed all videos from YouTube, so I had no alternative but to try and scrounge up a Windows boot. This only served to give me a very negative opinion of NBC, and consider them quite amateurish to pick such a restricting technology for something that should be available for everyone.

While Flash has it's problems, it works fine in Linux, so I would say (at this point), it is a much superior technology choice.

If you KNOW your audience is entirely on Windows (maybe Mac).... then you can consider Silverlight with knowing you won't be cutting out part of your audience.

Answer 2

Well 6 million watched the Olympics on NBC, which used a silverlight player. So at least 6 million. I've never seen exact stats, but you can be pretty certain that it is pretty small still.

Also, there is an implementation of silverlight for linux called moonlight.

Answer 3

I think an interesting stat comes from this site itself. Have a look at how many silverlight questions there are! And how many responses - it's not the most active topic!

Answer 4

This was the weekly poll over on CP a few weeks back. Out of the 1463 developers responding, aprox. 62% had Silverlight installed on at least one system.

So... if you're making a site targeted at Windows developers... and don't mind locking out a third of your potential market...

Answer 5

I haven't been able to get stats. I'd assume they might release some at PDC in late October. If you're building a site which needs to target a non-developer audience who won't want to install another plugin, you might want to wait for Silverlight.

I have done a good amount of testing with Moonlight on Linux, and it works well for sites which use either use Silverlight 1.0 functionality (pretty much 100% supported) or which happen to use the Silverlight 2.0 bits which Moonlight currently supports. The caveat is that some websites explicitly check the user agent and won't offer content if you're not on a "supported" platform. That's poor website coding, not a fault of the Silverlight plugin.

Answer 6

I struggled with this for a while. Ultimately, I chose to develop my site using Silverlight for the major components. I did a good bit of research, and I reached the following bottom-line conclusion:

If Silverlight fails, it will not be for lack of installed base. There are simply too many levers for MS to pull (windows update, embedding it in IE8, or even paying highly trafficed sites to use it.

I will add this from Alexa - microsoft.com has pretty impressive daily reach and it uses SL on the main page. I would also not be surprised at all if Outlook Web Access is moved to Silverlight - thereby turning every single office outlook user who wants to access email from home/other into a roaming SL installer.

Alexa Link comparing microsoft.com/ebay.com/amazon.com

I will add this from ScottGu's blog entry:

In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV), the Netherlands (by NOS), Russia (by Sportbox.ru) and Italy (by RAI). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers.

Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight.

Answer 7

I think you'll see a dramatic increase in the Silverlight install base after Silverlight 2.0 officially comes out. Right now it's still in beta. Silverlight 1.0 is out and runs quite well from what I've seen in Moonlight on Linux, but it's much harder to create full-scale applications for than version 2.0. According to Microsoft, Moonlight will be "100% compatible" at release time. See Scott Guthrie's blog (note: 2.0 was called 1.1 at the time).

Nick R, as for the fact that there isn't much Silverlight activity on these forums, I think the biggest reason for that is the very active community on the silverlight.net forums.

Answer 8

Scott Guthrie said (at Remix UK Sept 18 2008) that Silverlight is currently downloaded 1.5 million times per day. Over 115 million downloads since the version 1 release.

The Version 1 installed base will automatically update to version 2 when it is out of beta.

Answer 9

The larger question is how many users will your site lose if implemented in Silverlight. And, it very much depends on your audience.

If you're running a site about the joys of Linux kernel hacking or the virtues of Internet security, you'll probably lose a significant chunk of your audience. If you're running a more mainstream site, my experience is that, sadly, people will download anything they're told to most of the time. That's why spyware and malware work. And, as the NBC/Olympics deal shows, Microsoft will aggressively push its partners to use Silverlight until it's fairly ubiquitous.

I won't be using Silverlight until it's more mature because I do cater to a fair number of Linux users, but I might for a less technically-oriented site.

Answer 10

Wow! Scott said the same thing at Mix in February 08 about run rate - 1.5m. So it seems that a daily run rate of 1.5m per day for 6 months would add 270m installs to the installed base. So their numbers are not exactly clear in their meaning.

If one assumes the 115m installed base is correct, then it implies a run rate around 700k per day in the six months since SL2. Of course, many users are upgrading versions B1 to B2 as an example.

Either way, it is gaining some steady installs. It would be nice to see the run rate improve. By 2nd quarter of next year, it should be dramatically higher due to v2 shipment, application/web site adoption, pre-installation on various computers (like HP) and any unannounced distribution mechanisms.

Answer 11

if you're that concerned about locking out potential users, you should be building a low-bandwidth HTML only version of your site anyways...regardless of whether you use Flash or Silverlight.

Answer 12

While in general I support the idea of developing a site using silverlight and feel that that, depending on your audience, you should not have too much trouble getting users to download the plug in I would caution you against assuming that Microsoft will release the plugin built into IE or as a part of windows update.

I have had two separate Microsoft Technology Evangelists tell me that the company is reluctant to do that due to Anti-Trust reasons.

This was over a year ago and their strategy has probably evolved since then, but it enough to make me not count on that as an option for greater market penetration.

Answer 13

During the keynote @ ReMIX UK when ScottGu gave the figure of 1.5 million installs/day I was sat next to Andrew Shorten, one of the Adobe platform evangelists (and also a good chum). He was telling me Adobe have independant evidence of an AVERAGE of 12 million installs a day, with over 40 million downloads.

It would appear 1.5 million is a tiny amount of what it could be.

Answer 14

Quick Answer: www.riastats.com

This site compares the different RIA plugins using graphical charts and graphs.

It gets its data from small snippets of javascripts running on sites accross the web (approx 400,000 last time I looked)

At the time of this post, Silverlight 2 was sitting at close to 11%.

I would not take this as the end-all, be-all in RIA stats, but it's the best site I've found so far.

-Jeff

Answer 15

Don't forget that the Silverlight 2 install base will never include PPC Mac users. It doesn't look like the Moonlight people are targetting them at all, despite the heroic effort to add PIC streaming for Silverlight 1.0 users for the Obama inauguration.

Answer 16

At the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Scott Guthrie said that Silverlight was installed on "45% of the world's Internet-connected devices"

http://www.betanews.com/article/PDC-2009-Live-from-the-Day-2-keynote/1258561992 (quote taken from "9:28am PT") entry