Comment by asveikau

Comment by asveikau 2 days ago

26 replies

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2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion: they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third party hacks on this platform.

2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had really terrible performance.

They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app compatibility for the next release.

2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8 and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework rewrite to cope with.

jandrese 2 days ago

At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.

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  • scarface_74 2 days ago

    That’s a popular misconception.

    The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.

    It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen.

    When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

    Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back then.

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    • asveikau 2 days ago

      It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world.

      I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos online...

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      • tesseract a day ago

        Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.

        The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.

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        • wink a day ago

          Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.

          I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.

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      • hn_acc1 2 days ago

        Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new flash release, download, extract, rename to have a version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it works.

        I think it got to be so common that firefox supported reloading the library without restarting the browser if you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins" page.

        And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions...

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    • seba_dos1 a day ago

      > When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM.

      It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser.

      I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.

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      • M95D a day ago

        I remember having a Flash app on Nokia E70. I never used it. The phone was lauched in 2006, but I don't know if the app was there from the beginning because I bought it second-hand in 2008.

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      • scarface_74 20 hours ago

        That was “Flash light” not full Flash.

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        • seba_dos1 10 hours ago

          The Symbian one, yep. Maemo had the full Flash though.

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    • _wire_ 17 hours ago

      Wait, it wasn't about performance, but it was about Performance?

      It was that a pseudo-machine/VM approach put the VM IP owner (Adobe, Sun/Oracle) in driver's seat for control of the product's precious HW resources while letting their affiliates define the UI. What could go wrong, knowing that to invite in the vampire of their bloat & risk was to give those IP owners a competitive leg up to override all your design choices and serve their own markets, contrary to everything Jobs had done to rescue Apple from its clone wars.

      Oh, and that Flash and Java were the world's most popular malware/APT delivery vehicles at that that continued to wreck PCs for many years after 2007.

      But it wasn't about performance!

      Or why Jobs choose to not drive a stake into his own heart to defend from vampires.

      It would be interesting to see a companion presentation from the POV of Cingular/ATT. They likely also were very surprised and entertained by Jobs' device!

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    • chrisco255 a day ago

      My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.

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      • scarface_74 20 hours ago

        Your 90s area PC also had disk swapping and wasn’t running on a tiny battery. The Flash of 2007 was much more processor intensive and in the 90s, I doubt you were streaming quality video with Flash.

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      • asveikau a day ago

        Suddenly I remember circa ie4 or ie5 that had the "active desktop" feature that made even well spec'd machines grind.

        Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.

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    • tgma 2 days ago

      nit:

      > It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.

      Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS updates.

      We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.

      P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.

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      • outworlder a day ago

        > We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.

        Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.

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      • scarface_74 2 days ago

        Yes “I drank the Kool aid” when Adobe couldn’t get Flash to run decently on a 1Ghz/1Gb RAM Android. But it was going to run smoothly on a 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM first gen iPhone?

        Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?

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    • jandrese 2 days ago

      And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight work on devices with even less impressive specs.

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