In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the 'Trusted Application' model to the browser for the first time. New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives. Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds. Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices.

Today, we're happy to announce the release of Silverlight 5.