Netflix, Silverlight 5 and Mountain Lion

I had flawless streaming in Lion. Now that I have Mountain Lion it's choppy and slow. Netflix needs to either change the plugin they use (HTML 5, please) or Microsoft (Doubtful they'll care at all) needs to upgrade Silverlight. It's peculiar that Netflix even uses Silverlight. Hardly anyone has ever used it or still uses it.

Everything seems to work better for me in Mountain Lion. Streaming in Netflix works great in Mountain Lion for me with the latest version of Silverlight 5.1

I'm also running Silverlight 5.1. It I believe comes down to memory management. Safari and it's associated processes are sucking up nearly 1GB of RAM. Add that to around 250MB's being taken up by the Silverlight plugin. It's too much for the plugin and Safari to work in sync with any kind of fluidity.

Hopefully there'll be an update to Silverlight to bump up the hardware acceleration for new drivers and plugins associated with Mountain Lion.

Thanks Tstam! I did as you exactly described and netflix runs perfectly now.... Thanks

I have issues with Netflix with Safari as well. Firefox and Chrome both run Netflix flawlessly, however.

YAY!!!

I wrestled after updating to mountain lion, and what ailed me seems so oddly simple and preventable.

I went to chrome:plugins and saw that silverlight had been updated but was not enabled! That is why it kept asking.

Thank you for the leads from Tstam and others here. Hope that helps someone.

TStam - I followed your advice and it worked perfectly.

For any other novices like me, you can do a spotlight search for "Internet Plug-Ins" to find the plug in called silverlight in that folder.

I can't believe Netflix's whole advice was "Don't use HD" and "Call your computer manufacturer". LOL

Anyhow, thanks.

Thsi is what I am getting. Safari, Chrome and Firefox all resource hog the cpu when silverlight is running. Uninstall, reinstall, no help. Rolling back is a possible option, but I have started booting into windows for most of my media watching. Silverlight needs to work well, is this just me?

Spotlight isn't running. I've gone through all the processes. In Lion (10.7) cpu use by silverlight never went over 60%. I am going to try a reinstall of mountain lion today, let you knwo how that goes.

Anybody found that MS Silverlight is the culprit for slowing sown Mountain Lion, esp on shutdown? Upgraded to ML no problem and alsoI had a personal policy of no Microsoft software on my mac.(one of the reasons for converting to mac from ms was that I was sick of ms conflicts and endless security updates).

recently decided to upgrade to last version of Flip for mac and the installer for that also had option to install silverlight. Should not have been tempted. Post-silverlight install was when hasd shut down times extended. Didn't immediately twig. Uninstalled silverlight and mac immediately back to previous speeds. Lived without silverlight for 18 months beforehand so cannot see what it adds. Have resumed no MS software on my mac policy.

What people need to do is make/convert their sites to HTML5 instead of using silverlight or flash.

Also, netflix should create an OS X app so that we can use our Apple Remote as well rather than having to scroll around with the mouse.

The only reason I use SilverLight is Netflix.

An OS X app would be fantastic, or html5.

It might have taken over an hour to find the right way to uninstall so it would let me reinstall, instead of saying there was a more recent version somewhere and blocking reinstall.

These are the instructions that did it.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=474827

I tried just about every solution I could to fix the problem of Silverlight telling me that there already was a more current version of Silverlight on my computer (a Mac Mini) than what I was trying to load. Netflix told me to remove Silverlight from Hard Drive-->Library--> Internetplug-ins.

Other advice I saw also had removals from Library-->Receipts and Library/ApplicationSupport/Microsoft/Silverlight. Althugh this advice may have helped I was still unable to dowload Silverlight because it still told me there already was a more current version of Silverlight on my computer.

I was just about to cancel my account with Netflix when I thought I'd try one more thing:

I plugged a flash drive into another Apple computer and copied Silverlight from Hard Drive-->Library--> Internetplug-ins and then after ejecting the flash drive went over to the MacMini, and copied Silver light into the MacMini's Hard Drive-->Library--> Internetplug-ins.

I'm pleased to report I can watch Netflix again.

That said, three Netflix tech support people and one Micosoft tech person all of whom were very polite, but never suggested this approach and I haven't seen it suggested in other user forumes either. I hope it offers some help t others.

Have a good holiday.