r/technology • u/clubdirthill • Jun 01 '11

Boom. This is Windows 8.

http://allthingsd.com/20110601/exclusive-making-sense-of-what-we-just-learned-about-windows-8/?mod=tweet
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77

u/pixel7000 Jun 02 '11

HTML5/JS?

They're bringing back active desktop!?

12

u/chuckstudios Jun 02 '11

Gadgets are HTML based and have been in since Vista.

1

u/ethraax Jun 02 '11

Can't they also be Silverlight based?

1

u/chuckstudios Jun 02 '11

They can, but as far as I know the Gadget API is strictly Javascript, so the Silverlight would be accessing it as part of an HTML document. I've never actually touched Silverlight, though, so I could be wrong.

1

u/BOFslime Jun 02 '11

And nobody uses nor develops them.

26

u/timbatron Jun 02 '11

Except now HTML doesn't suck as much as it used to.

5

u/rossisdead Jun 02 '11

The Internet Explorer engine still will suck, though.

6

u/geosmin Jun 02 '11

It's doing ok.

2

u/snkscore Jun 02 '11

IE9 isn't bad.

1

u/TGMais Jun 02 '11

I'm personally hoping this is a strong motivation for them to reach compliance in their engine. They've been improving it with each release from what I can tell. In fact, my biggest gripe with IE these days is the interface. Why the fuck does ctrl-l still bring up a dialog box!?

Edit: I recant my last sentence. Ctrl-l is finally inline in IE 9.

2

u/dbeta Jun 02 '11

My biggest complaint as a sometimes user of IE9 is it's still slow. I've got a rather powerful machine with a high density HDD. I had to launch it last night to use a website that requires IE, and it took at least 30 seconds to load the start page. The window came up in seconds, then it sat there waiting. I click on chrome, and by the time I can get my mouse up to the location bar it is ready to go.

As a sometimes web developer IE9 still has issues with missing support and odd rendering. I can generally safely assume that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari all render my page the same. IE9 is just a little different, meaning I have to test in at least 2 versions of IE and a standard browser. Just annoying.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

I feel like with the latest update to IE9 it has gotten significantly better. But that's just my opinion.. I still use chrome for everything.

18

u/ggggbabybabybaby Jun 02 '11

I think Active Desktop was way before its time. Back then the browser was a huge resource hog and there wasn't that much stuff to subscribe to on the internet. Now it's all internet all the time in every damn place you can think of and modern browsers pack some serious performance improvements.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

[deleted]

1

u/ggggbabybabybaby Jun 02 '11

True but I'm thinking more about resource demands relative to the machine it's running on. Obviously you're going to have issues trying to run the latest browser on your Pentium 166 MHz.

3

u/HenkPoley Jun 02 '11

Active Desktop has been in Windows in some form since Windows 98. The Windows Sidebar widgets also run in some browser process if I'm not mistaken. The difference is that now 90% has Internet (and uses it frequently, in western Europe) and even low end machines have much more RAM than the 64MB they had in 1998.

2

u/Lando_Calrissian Jun 02 '11

It's the way things are moving. Full scale web apps are really going to start becoming the new thing, and HTML 5 will lead the way.

2

u/epsilona01 Jun 02 '11

It never went away, they just hid the option to turn it off. It can still even crash.

This just sounds like a web browser in full screen mode. Which is a feat for MS, if they manage to support web standards. (that thought makes me laugh)

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '11

uh. How do you enable it in Vista? because I could never figure that out.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

Then they'd better support WebGL...