I’m not sure where you got that from but it makes no sense at all. Of course the Win8 desktop will run on Win32 as usual, JavaScript is far too slow. Vista tried to rebase Windows Explorer on what later became WPF, and the experiment had to be abandoned due to poor performance. Microsoft certainly won’t repeat that experiment with an even slower language. If they want to run on ARM they’ll port Windows to ARM machine code, not to JavaScript.
Hah, never knew that. Though I guess it makes sort of sense.
By reading Microsoft’s own article on the topic, and watching the video there (which shows the Win7 ghetto mode). And to be clear, Windows ITSELF isn’t Javascript, Windows apps are.
But this confirms you can still switch to the classic desktop: Windows 8 Running on ARM, NVIDIA Kal-El Notebook Demoed
You get a standard Windows 8 desktop as well as the new tiled start screen
It also has a couple of shots showing the usual startt bar at the bottom and no tiles.
Wendelius
All Win8 apps run full-screen by default, with the ability of the shell to run them side-by-side. What you’re seeing there is just the Win7 “Classic” environment running in full screen. This page has a picture of a Win8 app (tweetarama?) running side-by-side with the Win7 Classic environment.
And I guess in practice if Win8 flops, people will just run their Classic environment full-screen and not launch any Win8 apps, but that’s not what Microsoft is pushing.
So… Win8 has a Win7 VM in it?
It’s not clear that it’s a VM, and I suspect that from a technical perspective it’s not. But it sure looks and appears to act like one.
I’m going to save my sputtering outrage for until Microsoft reveals what they actually intend to do with this environment. It seems absurd even for them to think they’d be pushing this as the new standard desktop for standard desktops.
This OS will so not fly in regular office work.
It’s most definitely not. The UI is just a that, an interface, it’s not the entirety of an OS. I was using entirely different UIs back in the 90s instead of the standard explorer offered by Windows. I tried various replacements like GeoShell, LiteStep and EVWM.
What is interesting is that merely by previewing Windows 8, Microsoft has probably sabotaged a lot of their own revenue this year, due to companies being reluctant to upgrade to Windows 7 now that they know something vastly different and new is on the horizon.
If Windows 8 is as revolutionary as it looks, Win7 will be the corporate standard well into 2020.
Doubtful. This looks pretty out there as far as a business interface. I imagine Win7 will end up like XP in that it will be the OS companies hang onto for years more.
My interpretation of this article is that Microsoft provides a JavaScript library so that HTML5 apps can use (some subset of) the regular Win32 API, while also running outside of a browser window so that they superficially look like native apps. That’s all. It’s “the” Win8 application format only insofar as it’s the most suitable for web apps (duh) and possibly multiplatform apps – although Silverlight 5 is going to put up some strong competition in that space. Traditional applications and the traditional Windows UI aren’t going away on the desktop, and they aren’t going to be virtualized on top of some crazy all-encompassing HTML5 engine either.
Because companies are known for their love of things that are vastly different and new?
Chris, I’m not sure what language you’re reading that in. They don’t mention Silverlight anywhere, and when asked about whether you can write Win8 apps in Silverlight, all they would say is that IE10 will still support the Silverlight plugin.
They don’t mention writing (non-“Classic”) Win8 apps in C anywhere, either, nor do they even so much as hint that they use Win32. They talk about how new apps can be written using HTML5/JS with special Microsoft libraries (that obviously do hook into Win32 at some level, like Silverlight and WPF do, but that’s an implementation detail, not critical to the developer).
It seems crazy to me that they wouldn’t use Silverlight as the system-level API for the new Win8 apps, but there are plenty of blog posts about how the writing has been on the wall for Silverlight and the Windows team hates .NET and was dedicated to HTML5 as a political matter.
But they obviously intend Windows 8 to be the future for all devices, PCs, tablets and netbooks. So any company who was planning on upgrading to Windows 7 will likely put those plans off. Surely MS’s financial forecast predicted some kind of revenue arriving from Win7 upgrades, no?
My take on it was that they are trying to do a similar transition that they did when they went from DOS to Windows. Old apps work, but they look crappy by comparison.
I bet the reason Microsoft announced this so early was because they felt competition pressure after the Chromebooks announcement, and maybe other Apple plans.
For this to be a viable option, MS will have to redesign the Office suite to work with the new tile paradigm. I question whether they will be able to accomplish this, even if Win8 is as much as two years out.
Because when you announce a new version before people have upgraded to the current version, people tend to hold off because they want to “wait and see”.
I’m reading the plain English version, without the Kool-Aid you’ve been drinking…
Look, this is a press release, not an API reference. I’m assuming you are not following Microsoft’s developer blogs because they’ve been celebrating the revival of native C/C++ development for the last few months. And Silverlight is the most active .NET project these days, with a huge amount of new functionality for version 5.
The press release talks about the HTML5 API exclusively because that’s the hot new thing, not because the native and .NET APIs somehow disappear. They didn’t talk about printers either – do you think that means you can no longer connect a printer to Windows 8?
Silverlight already supports out-of-browser apps, by the way, and they certainly won’t drop that feature either.
Again, I have to say I don’t think so. The way most companies upgrade their core OS puts this into doubt. Most businesses are just finishing, or have only recently finished, their upgrades to Win 7 after holding off Vista. The ones that haven’t upgraded yet are either doing it for financial reasons or because they are still testing Win 7 to work in their environment and working out kinks, usually related to custom software. Neither of these potential customers are going to want to jump into Win 8.
Unfortunately for MS, too many new features scares businesses.