Watching Netflix on a Mac couldn’t be any easier, since the streaming video service phased out its reliance on the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin. All you need is a Netflix account, a high-speed Internet connection and the time to watch your favorite shows and movies. Netflix automatically detects your Internet speed and streams its videos in the best quality your bandwidth and browser can handle. On modern Mac computers, Safari supports the best resolution: up to 1080p when streaming Netflix on OS X Yosemite. For high-definition video, you need a high-speed Internet connection with download speeds of at least 5 megabits per second. Older Macs with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or later running Google Chrome version 3 or later don’t support HTML5 streaming for Netflix. Netflix will prompt you to download the Microsoft Silverlight plugin when you first try to play a video. According to PCWorld, Netflix uses these extensions to download a closed-source plugin that restricts subscribers from recording content. Although Mozilla has plans to release a modified version of these extensions, in their current form they violate Mozilla’s policies on digital rights management, or DRM. Until that happens, when you try to play a Netflix video on Firefox, the browser will give you instructions for installing the Silverlight plugin, a small 14.5MB file that takes just a minute or two to install. Writer Bio
