When the Windows ARM port was announced, many people had hoped for general purpose ARM devices that could replace their cheap laptops. This is not the case, so people complain. Also, the fact that Apple does it doesn't mean it's right. People complain about the Apple situation all the time as well.
They can run Android on them, which is open (I'm typing this comment on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 w/ keyboard running a CM9 nightly build).
Or they can run real Linux distros ... Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Linaro are all excellent working distros for a variety of ARM devices. I have a Trim Server running Fedora 17 which is just one open source graphics driver away from being a nice general purpose low end desktop replacement.
Do "Win8 ARM devices" actually exist? Maybe there are a handful of them, but there are a huge number of ARM devices available right now to buy that don't have locked bootloaders (or are trivially breakable like most Android devices). Who cares about what Microsoft are doing in an already overcrowded market, bringing along a new OS that has no installed application base? There's no reason to imagine that Win8/ARM is going to become an important platform, just like WinNT/PowerPC and Alpha never went anywhere.
Because it sets a very worrying president for the future of computing. This Apple like level of control is the holy grail for monopolists like Microsoft.
They have no market share. Sure, not yet
Don't underestimate just how powerful a draw of having Office BUNLED with the OS will have. It's basically Mocrosoft using their dominant market position in Business software to buy market share for their new OSes.
My personal view : in three years time Microsoft will be the dominant player in the tablet market, closely followed by Apple. In 5 years, they'll have 80% of the market. And Office will no longer be bundled.
They don't really exist yet (in the general availability sense of existence), because no Win8 device really exists yet (Win8 hasn't gone gold). The point is that they will exist, and if manufacturers plan on supporting Win8, they'll have to put the bootloader locks on. Once a Win8 device, always a Win8 device. (Though I'm not convinced at this point that people won't be able to hack their ways around it).
Windows phone 8 will have the same kernel as Win8/ARM, so basically they're merging their mobile and desktop OSs. This will make it possible, among other things, to run a full desktop on your phone (i.e. via a dock with separate monitor/keyboard/mouse).
>When the Windows ARM port was announced, many people had hoped for general purpose ARM devices that could replace their cheap laptops
AFAIK Microsoft never claimed this, so I don't see how the complaints are valid.
Also, many people here who are complaining that want to do this are unlikely to be running Windows on those devices and would prefer almost anything else, especially Ubuntu or Android.
> Are you allowed to create native code-generators on iOS?
Absolutely not (unless you jailbreak of course). In fact, due to this UIWebView are not JITed either and in-application browsers have significantly worse performances than the standalone Safari application or pinned "offline web applications": the latter two are "opted out" of sandbox restrictions and can generate executable code at runtime.
It's a fourfold difference (~2200ms versus ~9100ms on three runs of each) on synthetic benchmarks (Sunspider 0.9.1 on an iPhone 4S running iOS 5.1.1, UIWebView was tested through Instapaper 4.2), which I would call significantly worse.
> otherwise nobody would use it.
Performance is not everything: they are convenient especially given iOS's debatable story for switching between applications (especially back and forth between an application and a web browser).
> But lots of apps do use it e.g. Linkedin, Facebook, Reeder, Google Search, iCab Mobile etc and it is not noticeably worse.
It's "not noticeable"[0] for JS-light websites because... well the JIT is for javascript code, running JS slower doesn't matter if there's no JS code.
[0] it is most definitely noticeable, many sites — especially full-page non-mobile ones with ads shit — load significantly faster using Safari than using embedded UIWebView.
I just downloaded Facebook from the German App Store today and spent some time reading the reviews. The app averages at 2 stars and most people complain specifically about terrible performance. I can confirm this on an iPad 1, FWIW.
For Windows RT, is iOS the standard of comparison, or is Windows 8? We were excited that Windows for ARM was going to be a full OS, rather than a mobile one.
Microsoft will be offering tablets with the full Windows 8 via x86 tablets in addition to the ARM ones with Windows RT. In other words, there will be a full OS in direct competition with a crippled/mobile version, and they will look exactly the same.
In the end, consumers will buy Windows RT tablets, expecting Windows 8, only to realize that they can't run their preferred programs such as Firefox or Chrome, and Microsoft and Windows 8 on the whole will come out looking really bad.
Honest question: How do you miss the constant bitching about the walled garden of iOS? The endless articles complaining about the lack of emulators, development tools, and yes even browsers. There was even a period 2 years ago with dozens of articles about how Firefox would never be available for iOS.
The sudden care about Windows 8 now is because it's about to be released and developers are just now starting to work on it.
Or more accurately: "2. We've already had threads and threads of criticism for Apple over this subject. They're not changing and we've moved on."
The reason this is worth talking about re: Windows 8 ARM, is that people are optimistic they can still convince Microsoft to take a different approach.
I think the pertinent question is, does .NET get to JIT? If so, you're right, same basic situation as iOS.
But if .NET doesn't get to JIT either, then you have the OS vendor's flagship language/platform being crippled by this policy. Apple doesn't support any managed language on iOS (Objective-C is purely compiled ahead of time), and so the lack of JIT doesn't hurt iOS apps developed with the officially supported language.
Yes, performance. And I never doubted that it supports C++, but the point is that it also officially supports C# which, if it can't be JITted, will take a nasty hit. iOS has no equivalent to C#, since the only officially supported languages are compiled ahead of time.
I'd actually say this is most likely. You get a hit on install times but after that startup times get much better. Getting fast app launch times are incredibly important.
They're not disallowed, if that's what you mean. You flip a switch on the back in order to enable developer mode, and then you can do whatever you want with the machine. There are already a couple of Ubuntu releases for Chromebooks.
"Sure, if you install OS" is always the wrong answer to "Can you run X?"
The answer, apparently, is no, you cannot run Firefox with CromeOS. You can root the device and install it manually, but I'm not sure how well that works.
MS is doing the exact same thing as Apple with iOS Safari and Google with ChromeOS. Not sure why they're evil here, but oh well.
Some clarification is in order here. Flipping an explicitly provided and documented switch is not "rooting" the device. That carries the connotations of hacking around some form of enforced security getting in your way.
And yes you can install it manually without hacking the OS... It's just a form of Linux after all. Go bug Firefox and get them to offer a package that works with the OS if this is too much trouble.
Now, is your problem that they don't go out of their way to add compatability for random third party packages on a cloud based OS? You're not the target market, then :P
>Now, is your problem that they don't go out of their way to add compatability for random third party packages on a cloud based OS? You're not the target market, then :P
I'm not bothered by Google, Apple's, or MS' decision, really. It's just that answering "Can you run Firefox on ChromeOS" with "You can run Firefox on a Chromebook... if you run Ubuntu" just doesn't help anyone that actually wants to run ChromeOS.
Also, I'm aware that it's just flipping the switch. It's not, for example, the same steps you need to do to root a Kindle Fire, but it's still the same result: You still need root access to install(and possibly run) Firefox with ChromeOS.
I'm not sure what else you would expect though. The browser is the operating system in the case of ChromeOS. (It's even in the name!)
It would be like taking a system designed explicitly for Konqueror, for KDE, and all of the specific things that entails, and then turning around and wanting to reconfigure that system to use Dillo or Iceweasel or something else.
> Mozilla could port Firefox to Nacl so it could run a Chromebook.
Not very well, though.
NaCl supports JIT, basically enough for Mono. But it does not support self-modifying arbitrary asm code, which is absolutely necessary for fast JS, PICs need that.
Also, NaCl increases code size significantly due to its sandboxing mechanism.
Finally, NaCl performance is good on x86 but less so on x86_64 and ARM, again due to how it sandboxes (on x86 there are some nice tricks that make it work better).
Finally, you would need to port to NaCl. It isn't trivial, you need to use the Pepper APIs.
So you could run Firefox, but it would need to run JS in the interpreter, it's code size would be very large and performance would be significantly slower than a true native app. It would not be a competitive browser on a Chromebook due to those large limitations. So practically speaking, Chromebooks do not allow other browsers.
People have always complained about new versions of Windows. They bitch and moan and they cry and vouch never to touch it, but in the end, it does not matter.
Most people buy a new PC every few years and it comes with some sort of OS and it looks different every time. Whether that was XP or Vista or 7 or 8, they won't know. And consequently, we can complain all we want, but if it comes pre-installed and IT departments like it, it will work.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft will die eventually (just like we all do), but it will be a gradual, less painful process. Maybe this is one of their last serious stabs at something exciting. But they will die of obscurity, not concrete failure.
As one data point I was always the next upgrade until about 2006 or so when budget PC's hit a point that they would do everything I wanted as fast as I wanted. I mainly use a mac now, but my PC is probably 5 years+ old and does everything as fast as I would need.
Not upgrading is an option if there aren't really critical issues. "looking great" is not one of them - only being compatible with multiple must-have applications would do it.
WinXP + IE6 is still an option and it has been 10+ years already. If windows 8-9-10 sucks, then win7 can easily carry on for as long as hardware manufacturers keep shipping compatible drivers; and if windows 8-9-10 sucks, then they can easily do it for dozens of years.
Right, but that does not imply a move away from Windows in general. People 'update' whenever they buy a new machine or the IT department makes them update. Whether or not they skip a version or two does not kill Microsoft immediately but it does not save them either.
I guess what I was trying to say was that Microsoft seems to be losing right now and they might just die in the somewhat near future. However, this will not be the direct consequence of a bad version of Windows or of people skipping a version. We have seen that before. People always complain about change, especially about changes in something they don't understand but have to use anyways. So people complaining about a new version of Windows is not interesting.
I do think Windows will seriously decline because of Windows 8, especially when you take into account all the other devices that now run Android or iOS. "PC's" or not, the fact remains that people are spending a lot of time on those "other" devices now, and as for what will replace it, I think a combination of all of those.
I see Ubuntu becoming more popular and more consumerized, with popular games arriving for it. I see ChromeOS and Android gaining a bit of laptop market share. I see Macs gaining more market share, too. Governments and enterprises will increasingly use Linux or cloud alternatives.
The point is, Windows will not have the monopoly it had for 15 years, and that's a great thing. We've been waiting for that for a very long time.
Yes, but because native applications are here to stay, so it would seem, developers are in for a world of pain: writing your software for multiple incompatible platforms. This has been going on since iOS/Android at least, but it won't get any better soon.
Well, at least Windows 8 embraces HTML5 as a platform. They also have a new set of "Windows Runtime" (WinRT, not to be confused with Windows RT) APIs, which are consistent across all languages you can use to develop applications for it. Even JavaScript.
>I wonder if Windows 8 will be the death of the Windows platform
tl;dr: no.
I see this as another instance of the Windows Rule in effect: Skip every other release.
I will say I'm in the minority of people that likes the way Metro looks and acts even on the desktop. They'll get more apps come release time. Keep in mind, what we've all played with isn't even beta quality software.
You sure? They've had the Developer and Consumer preview out, yet they still have a practically empty store, and have been literally handing out checks to try and fill it.
Intel's halfassed efforts with the Atom really FUBAR'd the netbook. What a dog those computers are. The initial rabid enthusiasm that people had for Netbooks just set them up for a bad experience, which reinforced their prejudices against PCs predisposed them to flee to lag-free experiences like the iPad.
For those who read the title and started worrying that JavaScript will return to the stone age of performance: JS will be JIT-compiled on Windows 8 for ARM - but only in IE10.
Furthermore, HTML5/Metro apps - unlike similar kind of applications on iOS - will be JIT compiled and hardware accelerated too. Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/02/07/high-performan...
Dynamic code generation is also disabled on the CLR in Metro. I ran into this when trying to port a compiler/IDE to Metro (i.e. NO reflection.emit/codedom/roslyn). It's basically impossible to write developer tools on Metro, in C++ or in C# doesn't matter. The best performing option is actually compiling to Javascript running in the browser...
Yeah, but there isn't a 1-1 correspondence between CLR bytecode and native instructions. If you want to access SIMD instruction sets on x86, x64 or ARM, the CLR won't let you do that.
Ideally the CLR takes care of that (it's in Microsoft's own interest to have it create good native code)
I don't mean to translate "mov eax, ecx" to the CLR bytecodes of "ecx = eax;", but targetting CLR as kind of a CPU in its own right (with whatever capabilities it has).
There is no "best tool" for the job. Used to be that you've had one tool for the job 50 years ago, now you have 50 tools for the same job. And 500 more, And 5000 coming...
If this is correct, then this matters much, much more than the sensationalism surrounding browsers on WoA being unable to run as desktop apps.
The entire focus of WoA is pretty much Metro-style apps, with Office on the desktop as something on the aside, so why would it matter that another browser can't place itself into the desktop? But if other browsers are actually going to be disadvantaged backend-wise, then that's something to worry about.
Microsoft totally missed the opportunity to make something open and wonderful. Now, we're basically getting iPads, but with bright cyan colors and a chronic inability to fit huge 128pt words on one page. "MUSI" "PICTUR" "SOCIA"
Building locked-down systems is not Microsoft's core competency. A big factor behind Windows' success was the massive developer support they received. With a few exceptions (like the undocumented ATL libraries), developers could do whatever the hell they want. They got a vibrant ecosystem in return. It looks like the same strategy is working for Android even today.
For the same reason I have to use Windows at work. Because the corporate world, for the most part, is still Windows. Windows is easy to support, easy to get support for, and very enterprise-oriented. Linux is behind on the "easy to support" front (in Windows, you can tell a user 'click this, then click that. Don't underestimate the need for a clear and consistent GUI), and Mac is still behind on the enterprise-oriented front. Microsoft is the only one going after the enterprise desktop market, even as they're pushing further into the consumer market.
This creates a catch-22, where corporations use Windows, so corporate software is written for Windows, and in turn, anyone who uses corporate software has to use Windows. If I send someone a .doc created in LibreOffice and they open it in Word, who knows what will change in the conversion. If part of your company goes open source, the entire company has to as well, for the sake of consistent performance.
This same reason can stop windows 8 from being adopted. A single, small legacy app that noone wants to maintain can easily delay OS upgrades in the organization for many years - that's why some companies still are on WinXP+IE6.
If a single legacy app needs JIT-stuff, then that company will just run Win7 in year 2030 even if it looks like a stone age tool by that time.
I don't think Android tablets have mostly failed because Android was open. They failed because they arrived too late in the market, Google didn't focus on 3rd party apps from the beginning, and their solution, Honeycomb, arrived a year later, and it sucked as an OS, with bugs, etc. So in effect iPad had about a 2 years head start.
Oh,is that why the iPad is such a big failure compared to Android tablets?
Will Microsoft achieve success by doing all of the same things as Apple? How has that worked out for them thus far? Will that cargo-cult bring them iPad-like success?
Apple is doing a pretty good job of being Apple, and Microsoft has done a really bad job trying to be Apple. Microsoft is bringing all of the same disadvantages, but few of the advantages.
Apple's behavior has been consistently vile for the last three decades. They've been profitable of late because of kick ass design innovation. Smart phones, tablets, displays that finally have decent resolution, it was Apple who got all those things going, and that's what earned them the money.
Microsoft has never been an innovator. Their strength has always been that by corporate standards they were on the side of openness, of choice of software running on commodity hardware that everybody could use.
If they start copying the vile behavior and not the design innovation, I think they'll end up on a downhill slide.
That was my impression as well; if Mozilla really wants FireFox on Windows 8 it is not impossible technically.
Mozilla is also 100% within their rights to complain that their implementation will be hampered in a way that IE will not be.
The whole situation reminds me of how Microsoft Office and other Microsoft apps got in trouble for using undocumented Windows APIs ( http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070208195343... ), except now they are upping the ante from undocumented to inaccessible.
The whole situation also reminds of me of how Apple never got in trouble for doing the exact same thing with Safari in iOS in spite of the iPad dominating the tablet market.
It's worth pointing out that the .Net Compact Framework doesn't support JIT right now. There's no guarantee that Win8Arm will have a .Net framework that supports JIT either.
If not, why do we all of a sudden care about this now?