How to Uninstall Silverlight

What is Silverlight?

Silverlight is a complete web framework that combines interactivity, animation, graphics, and multimedia. It was released initially as a video streaming plug-in for Internet Explorer but was later developed to handle a variety of multimedia applications. Microsoft Silverlight is now offered as an alternative to Adobe Flash and provided for all browsers on numerous OS platforms. This way a web application developer does not have to create multiple versions for browsers. Silverlight is presently a web-based application framework, which plans to make its presence in desktop-based applications as well.

How to Uninstall Silverlight

To remove Silverlight from any browser on Mac OS, follow the steps below –

  1. Close all browsers and then Open Terminal.
  2. Type cd and to go to the root directory.
  3. Type these commands at prompt.

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

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

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

    Browse /var/db/receipts and delete the following files:

    com.microsoft.installSilverlightPlugin.bom

    com.microsoft.installSilverlightPlugin.plist

This will ensure that the Silverlight plug-in is uninstalled from the Mac system completely.

You can follow these methods to uninstall Microsoft Silverlight from Windows. –

  1. Uninstalling from Control Panel
  2. Using Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
  3. Third Party software

Uninstalling from Control Panel – Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plug-in which is native to Internet Explorer, so it can be disabled from the add-ons. You can run the windows uninstaller in the control panel to remove Silverlight completely from the system. To uninstall Silverlight, follow these steps –

  1. Close all browsers
  2. Click Start and then go to Control Panel.
  3. Click on Add and Remove Programs in Windows XP or Program and Features in Win 7 / Vista.
  4. Select Silverlight from the list of programs installed and choose Change/Remove or Uninstall.

This will remove the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in from Windows.

Using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility – You can download the Windows installer cleanup utility from the Microsoft website. This application deletes almost all the registry keys related to Silverlight from the Windows registry. After downloading the application, you can click on the application and then follow the instructions to install it. Once done, follow the steps below –

  1. Close all the browsers.
  2. Click on Start and then go to All programs.
  3. Click on Windows Install Clean up.
  4. Choose Microsoft Silverlight.
  5. Click on the Remove button.

This will remove the entries related to Silverlight from the registry. Once this is done, close all the windows and then restart the system.

Third Party Software – You can use some of the third party software to uninstall Silverlight completely from the system. You can use these listed software to uninstall the Silverlight plug-in from the system.

  • Perfect Uninstaller software – This software adds a shortcut ‘force uninstall’ in the shell component. When removing Microsoft Silverlight, just right click on it and select force uninstall. This will completely remove Silverlight from all browser and folder locations, even if the uninstallation files are corrupt.
  • RegGenie – RegGenie is a powerful piece of registry editor software that removes all the unwanted keys present in the registry, which are left by any uninstalled software. This will help remove all the registry keys related to Silverlight.