Had a curious thing with an Outlook Web Access site since a couple of weeks. Everything was working fine and snappy, except when opening a popup editor for an e-mail message or an appointment the entire browser (all tabs) would freeze for a couple of minutes. After that, (if I had the patience to wait instead of terminate the process) I could often continue working fine. Eventually, I got so annoyed I turned to Chrome, which worked like a charm but did display an error message on top of the screen about not being able to start Silverlight. I didn’t know there was something ‘silverlighty’ in that window, but it turns out it does. So… could it be related to this?

Yes, it is. Turns out Silverlight has had an update from windows update somewhere in May. After repeating the procedure from my other blogpost and changing the path to 5.1.20513.0 and restarting my browser, everything is working great again in Firefox.

Although I still think there’s a problem with Microsoft for not updating the path to the silverlight executable when their software is updated, I now also look at Mozilla a bit. Would it be hard to show a warning about a failure to launch Silverlight, like Chrome does, instead of a browser-wide freeze?