What I would do if I was in charge of Windows 8 - Miguel de Icaza

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Jun-28.html

by igorgue • 16 years ago

76 92 16 years ago

rbanffy13• 16 years ago

What would I do? I would:

- change terms for OEM licensees so that they wouldn't be penalized for selling machines with other OSs or without OSs

- remove limitations on hardware on licensing for netbooks, thus removing performance and specification limits that kept those machines less powerful than they could be

- bundle IE 9 and pressure it into standard compliance

- remove any IE-specific HTML rendering code in the user interfaces so that the user could replace the HTML rendering engine with any other engine that implemented the same, clearly defined, public interfaces

- publish all interfaces for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution so that third parties would be able to provide plug-ins to replace or use those services interchangeably

- publish a list of all patents Linux and other notable free software projects may infringe and work with the community on solving the issues, perhaps entering a cross-licensing agreement with the Open Invention Network and donating patents to their pool

- adopt a modern file system, perhaps licencing ZFS from Sun and replacing NTFS

I guess being in charge of Windows 8 would not be enough, but it could be a start.

pavel_lishin• 16 years ago

> - remove any IE-specific HTML rendering code in the user interfaces so that the user could replace the HTML rendering engine with any other engine that implemented the same, clearly defined, public interfaces

How many Windows users do you think would do this, or even know what it means, as a percentage of the total?

rbanffy13• 16 years ago

The system should be completely modular. HTML rendering should be a service and any provider should be able to plug into the service infrastructure to provide it.

I imagine faster engines could be easily developed by the market, provided there is the opportunity for competition. Companies could also roll-out in-house developed, specific components that would plug into the system and provide added/reduced functionality in accordance to their needs.

Of course, that would sabotage the whole standard lock-in Microsoft employs to retain market share. I don't care. That's what I would do. And that's probably why Microsoft would never hire me ;-)

pavs3• 16 years ago

>- adopt a modern file system, perhaps licencing ZFS from Sun and replacing NTFS

Long time windows and Linux user, recently bought a macbook. The first thing I noticed is how smooth application running is (mine doesn't have SSD). In windows you can actually "feel" an application opening or when you are doing search for files. Nothing like that on Mac/OSX. I wonder if it has something to do with the file system. I have been told that NTFS is supposedly a superior file system than HFS+. I have no idea if its true or not.

Edit: Also no defragmentation on OSX!

pyre3• 16 years ago

IIRC, NTFS was over-designed/future-proofed and Windows actually only supports a fraction of it's functionality.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Strongly disagree; app launch feels much snappier to me on Windows than on OS X, where it's click - bounce - bounce - bounce - bounce - display.

NTFS is a much more modern fs than HFS+, but that doesn't necessarily make it faster.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

I think what you're "feeling" is a simple matter of disconnecting your UI thread from the "do stuff" thread. It's not the waiting that aggravates us most, it's the fact that the waiting bits drastically slow down, if not disable our ability to do other things in the meantime.

ori_b• 16 years ago

Might it just be that you got a new, faster computer?

astrange• 16 years ago

> Edit: Also no defragmentation on OSX!

OS X will still fragment large files - they don't fit in the catalog so HFS+ compression won't work on them (not that it works on user files anyway), and the auto-defragmenter only works on small things.

The difference is Apple doesn't ship a defragmenter, so you don't care. I think this solution would work just as well for MS.

rbanffy13• 16 years ago

Still, ZFS sports adjustable redundancy, checksumming to prevent silent corruption, block-level deduplication, zero-cost snapshots and lots of other niceties neither HFS+ nor NTFS support such things.

BTW, BtrFS on top of LVM will support a lot of that too, as soon as it gets ready, something I suspect it's not. It also sports better disk allocation method (blocks and extents vs. slabs). It would be really nice if Oracle decided to merge both filesystems (or, at least, the feature-sets)

tptacek3• 16 years ago

None of these things would help Microsoft at all. Basically, what you'd do is run Windows 8 for the benefit of all of Microsoft's competitors. That might be noble, but it's pretty dumb.

rbanffy13• 16 years ago

Your logic is deeply flawed. Why would you assume I would wanto to help Microsoft?

dman2• 16 years ago

Sandboxed installation would encourage app usage a lot, so I second the idea. Here are some others a) Microsoft seems to be the only one selling dev tools at this point. Releasing free versions of visual studio for developers would be great. b) Have something like synaptic/ports which allows developers / users to easily install apps / libraries with dependency resolution. c) Rethink their backward compatibility model. There is a business line of business that requires backward compatibility back to 1990, and theres a consumer line that doesnt care much about it. Right now the business line and the consumer line both hold each other back. eg business user - why do i need a graphics card to fully use new windows versions. d) Leverage integration between the OS and their online services. I think they can do this safely now without fear of antitrust issues now given google and apples sizes

jra101• 16 years ago

Microsoft already has free versions of Visual Studio, there are Express versions for C#, C++, VB.NET, etc...

pmjordan• 16 years ago

Moreover, even the grown-up VS is free for many students (and cheap for the rest), and with BizSpark they have a discount for startups too. I don't think dev tools are Microsoft's problem right now.

dman2• 16 years ago

I did know about the express versions, but in 2010 I do not want to track feature matrices for dev tools (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products). Some things like test driven development and source version control are not enterprise features anymore imo, theyre required. My earlier post was not clear about this, sorry about that.

Developing software today typically requires downloading a framework or two, checkout out code from github, code.google.com etc. Often to start developing using a particular framework foo on ubuntu requires just "apt-get install foo", on windows it still involves 1990s style chasing of dependencies.

In retrospect all the features that I ask for matter mostly to developers so there is definitely a bias in what I am saying.

bosch• 16 years ago

There's one thing that made it a hit for Apple that I'd like to see Microsoft emulate - Simplicity. If they can make it simple for the end user as well as the developer this will take off and be very useful.

zyb09• 16 years ago

Sandboxes have some nice advantages, but I think they would need to be really careful with the implementation. Too little sandbox and they are mostly useless, too much and you end up in the Disneyland-computing that is the iPad. Besides that, one of the defining things of Windows, for better or worse, is that applications can do anything they want if they dig hard enough and there are lots of legitimate cases for that type of application.

megablast• 16 years ago

Would most windows users be better served if the system was more like the iPad? IT support seems to think so, and except for developers, this maybe true.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

The relevant question is, "How much more like the iPad?"

If you look at the evolution of the sandboxing on the iPhone/iPad, you'll remember that the first version didn't even offer cut-and-paste between applications, and that multi-tasking is just coming now.

pjscott• 16 years ago

They can have an app store with sandboxed apps, without requiring that all apps go through the app store, with its sandboxing.

ben_straub2• 16 years ago

Granted this isn't an issue for most mainstream users, but this would put my company (Wacom) out of business. Not all input devices are keyboards or mice; not all applications can get by with only network and limited disk access. Not all computers are iPhones and iPads.

calcnerd2562• 16 years ago

Well, if the device were a file and the driver were allowed to request (once) unlimited access to that "file" ...

rbanffy13• 16 years ago

So, the solution would be to turn Windows (the heir of VMS) into Unix...

Not sure if the architecture impedance mismatch would allow it.

KevBurnsJr• 16 years ago

I truly disagree with just about every assertion in those slides. I use Windows because I feel in control.

I really don't like it when Microsoft decides to add a feature on the assumption that I'm an idiot.

pbz• 16 years ago

That's why it would need to be something new. Right now we have the "big pool" where you can have as much fun as you want, but you can also drown and there aren't lifeguards to help you out. What we also need is a "kiddie pool" where the water is shallow and safe. I don't think he's advocating for replacing the big pool with the kiddie pool. He just wants this AppStore that would allow regular folks to install / uninstall apps without the fear of messing up their system. A rewrite of the OS to prevent apps from doing what they want would break a ton of existing app -- that just won't fly. But, a "new type" of app, something that's safe and you install from the AppStore...

code_duck• 16 years ago

You use Windows because you feel in control? That's odd. I describe using Windows as feeling like I'm locked in a padded room with a start button.

wvenable4• 16 years ago

Windows is currently all things to all people. But that assumes that all users have the same needs and they don't. Most users struggle daily with stuff that we take completely for granted.

I too hate it when Microsoft adds a feature that assumes I'm an idiot. Every time I install Windows I have to go through the configuration dance to get it to "power user" settings. By default, it's not setup for you or me. It's not really setup for the average user either -- it's somewhere in the middle.

loewenskind3• 16 years ago

Exactly. Every new windows system takes me about 2 days to set up. Every default seems to be wrong, so I spend so much time rediscovering how to change it again.

On Mac I'm set up in an hour or two. Either the default is right, quick to change, or too much trouble to change to be worth the bother.

ElbertF• 16 years ago

Wait, are you being sarcastic? Whenever I use Windows I feel like it's trying to hold my hand the whole time (you have unused icons on your desktop!) and won't let me do basic things like setting up a custom backup script or picking a different window manager.

thewileyone• 16 years ago

Bingo! I wanted comment this exact same thing. I use Windows because I want to control what I do, not let someone else control things, like I have with my iPad and iPhone.

If the future of Windows in a controlled environment like iOS4.0, then my future leads to making Ubuntu my primary boot segment.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

Self-contained installations are an absolute critical must in the evolution of Windows. It's downright embarrassing how installing even a simple app will spray files all over your filesystem diarrhea-style, making it impossible to remove (sometimes even by using the uninstaller!)

So far Apple hasn't really enforced the app-container design pattern very strictly, though I think they ought. Adobe is the most egregious violator of this - they spew files all over the MacOS filesystem and require their proprietary installer to do anything to the app.

On top of this idea is the necessity to remove the registry altogether.

ben_straub2• 16 years ago

For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility. That means that all the techniques that work for installing apps now will work until Windows 7 is no longer supported.

My team has put a lot of effort into making our install more contained, but certain things still need to go in system locations. Registering a handler for a file extension means writing to the registry, as does (ironically) registering for visibility in the Add/Remove Programs UI.

I'm certainly jealous of the bundle system on OS X, but it doesn't solve everything. Device drivers still need to associate hardware devices with a handler, which we have to run code for on OS X.

RyanMcGreal2• 16 years ago

>For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility.

I wonder if they couldn't get around this by breaking compatibility on a new OS version and then running something akin to Wine to run apps for older OS versions.

thought_alarm• 16 years ago

> Registering a handler for a file extension means writing to the registry, as does (ironically) registering for visibility in the Add/Remove Programs UI

But it doesn't have to be that way. Microsoft can deprecate and replace those outdated mechanisms while still supporting them.

OS X's bundle system is indeed elegant, but it's been around for 20 years (!) and its benefits are well understood. You have to wonder how long it has to take for Microsoft (and others) to catch on.

contextfree• 16 years ago

The problem with mandating self-contained applications is that there are some useful features associated with applications that are INHERENTLY not self-contained. Shell integration is a good example, but basically any kind of integration or shared functionality (or even data) with the system or with other applications falls in this category.

The manifest approach described by Miguel could be a good compromise, but it's not immune to problems.

eru6• 16 years ago

Do you know how Bash does shell integration? (E.g. program specific completion?)

extension3• 16 years ago

Obviously no piece of software is self-contained. It has to make use of some sort of resources and interact with the user in some way. For a sandboxed platform, you carefully design the APIs to not grant any unintended privilege to apps. You can still do all sorts of fancy integration, you just do it through an airtight API.

sjs• 16 years ago

Installers on OS X have a manifest of files they install. I'd be surprised if MSI didn't do the same, but I guess not everyone uses MSI. On OS X most apps still leave prefs or other files around too so it's not perfect, but it's something. Tools like AppTrap can help clean up cruft when you delete apps.

wvenable4• 16 years ago

The problem with Windows is that there isn't a lot of API for very important system tasks. Instead, everything is held together by convention -- a DLL copied to the system directory, a registry key, shortcut files, etc. This has made it much harder for Microsoft to adjust Windows to better handle a much more user-hostile world. It has also made the software more brittle because they simply aren't forced to follow the convention.

For example, installing and uninstalling software is broken in Windows because there's no accounting by the operating system as to what was changed -- if an uninstaller is broken the user is pretty much stuck. If applications were forced to install themselves completely using a system API, then Windows could track the changes and simply undo them itself. This could be pretty low-level (it doesn't have to be MSI, for example) but if you want to write a file into the /Programs/ folder, you need to use an API that does just that. And if Microsoft decides to rename that folder again you are guaranteed that every application will continue to work.

This can be equally true of setting file associations, adding desktop/startmenu icons, the notification area, and auto updators. Applications have been allowed to basically spam your computer with icons and background tasks. This doesn't necessarily need to be sandboxed out of existence but instead held behind an API that empowers the user. Mobile operating systems already do much of this by asking you at install/runtime what access an application should have and then providing a system control panel for adjusting this access after the fact. Wouldn't it be great if there was a control panel that listed every background task started by Windows with the program it belongs to, a description, and the option to turn it off?

djacobs• 16 years ago

That is certainly one problem Windows has. It's also not really orthogonal (I'm looking at you, registry) and doesn't strive for simplicity or elegance like Unix/Linux tend to do. (Why the user folder is so ambiguous and mysterious before Windows 7 is beyond me.)

If Eric Raymond is to be believed, another problem is that it has no unifying concept, a la Unix's "everything is a file" or Apple's "make the GUI simple and focused".

wvenable4• 16 years ago

If they had provided APIs for every function that is part of the registry, they could changed the implementation at will. Instead, the registry is just another file system with all the same problems.

Unix also suffers from the same problem of convention over API. They do have a better convention and "everything is a file" is sort of an API onto itself but the concept is pretty much gone once you reach the level of Windowing System.

gaius4• 16 years ago

"Everything is an OLE server" is the closest Microsoft concept. And it is too - files on NTFS filesystems are a lot more than just files, only (nearly) no-one uses all the fancy stuff, and it's not really exposed through Explorer or CMD. You don't really need file extensions, for example, but everyone is so used to them.

The Registry arguably is no more or less sensible than /etc full of cryptically named config files and executable scripts, all in slightly different formats...

silvestrov• 16 years ago

This is not completely unlike the process model that Mac OS 7 had. Extensions could easily screw up the system, applications could write all over the filesystem and even damage the "System" resource file. All applications could modify all of memory.

OS X added process protection and fixed most file permissions and /System is almost read-only (some 3rd part still install stuff there). The major tool was Carbon: provide all the functionality as system calls instead of modifying lowlevel memory directly. Carbon was sourcecode backwards compatible, so you could easily modify your app and still have the same binary running on old Mac OS versions, and run on OS X at the same time.

Mac OS would have had Carbon-style protection sooner if Apple had not dreamed of Copland as the golden bullet as the future OS.

Microsoft needs to create a "Carbon" for installing and updating apps.

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

> Wouldn't it be great if there was a control panel that listed every background task started by Windows with the program it belongs to, a description, and the option to turn it off?

So.... `msconfig`? Ok, maybe it doesn't have all the descriptions, but it still lists all the registered services and allows you to disable them.

wvenable4• 16 years ago

I've never seen anyone but a power user use msconfig and even I have to google the file names to discover what some of the stuff does. I'm thinking of something considerably more user friendly.

calcnerd2562• 16 years ago

So many of the comments are "You're describing [something that already exists", and most of them are wrong.

WorkerBee2• 16 years ago

Silverlight out-of-browser applications. Do I win?

csomar• 16 years ago

This should work well, but need lot of work from the Microsoft and other parties part:

- Microsoft create a development environment as powerful as Visual Studio. You create "native" Windows applications that has full but controlled access to disk files, system resources, Internet connection...

- Application are native in a way they integrate nicely in the sidebar, menu, have nice graphics and animations...

- Type of these apps can be for example "Drop Box"

- Microsoft build an online app store and a desktop app store app. where users can download, purchase, rate and review apps.

As a user, I browse apps and select the one that fits the need. The app should blend with my Windows theme, be user friendly and fast.

Considering the huge number of Windows users this can turn into a multi-billion dollar market. This will especially make decent profit for single developers.

RyanMcGreal2• 16 years ago

>Microsoft create a development environment as powerful as Visual Studio. You create "native" Windows applications that has full but controlled access to disk files, system resources, Internet connection...

Perhaps this could become a raison d'etre for Silverlight.

cageface• 16 years ago

The system he describes sounds a lot like what I think web apps are going to look like in a few years. Why reinvent all this machinery for "native" apps that aren't any better for most tasks than a web app that also automatically solves the problems of backups, sharing, security, collaboration etc at the same time?

Sun was absolutely right then they said the network is the computer. They just jumped the gun by about 20 years.

extension3• 16 years ago

Native apps are dramatically better for many tasks than web apps are or will be in the foreseeable future. This is why we have the app store(s).

And the problems you mention really aren't "automatically" solved by web architecture, they are just easier to solve. However, there's nothing about native apps that make those problems particularly difficult, if you're willing to use a modern platform and ditch the legacy stuff.

Meanwhile, the web has already built its own substantial mountain of legacy junk.

gaius4• 16 years ago

I assure you that a web app doesn't automatically solve the problem of backups etc. It merely moves it to someone/somewhere else. But then, so did IBM 3270 back in the 1970s!

Splines2• 16 years ago

Microsoft purchased SoftGrid some time ago, and you can get a SKU of Office running in this sandboxed environment:

http://www.softgridblog.com/?p=130

10ren• 16 years ago

One VMware per app would be the easiest way to fix this. Just put the whole mess in a box and forget about it.

If MS is worried about people using this for servers, it's easy to add limitations at a higher level.

jkahn2• 16 years ago

I'm really surprised that nobody has mentioned App-V yet. I guess it's because of HN's bias towards developers rather than computing infrastructure types.

App-V encapsulates pretty much any Windows application. It prevents it from screwing up the system. It would be a good foundation for this app store - and it doesn't require that every app ever written is redone. It dummies out the registry and file system paths. The basics of this technology were used in Vista (and now Win7) to allow them to make major changes to filesystem structure without breaking compatibility with older apps. Microsoft bought this technology from Softricity years ago - http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/default.mspx.

If you want to see what this could be like - look at http://spoon.net/browsers/ if you have a Windows PC. Stream apps from the Internet to run locally in an isolated execution environment. (BTW: Spoon doesn't run on App-V, it is an alternative).

Splines2• 16 years ago

I mentioned it elsewhere in this thread. There's a "Click-to-run" SKU of Office 2010 available running under App-V. It's (seriously) magical technology. Your application streams to you while you run it, application updates are completely transparent, and registry modifications are entirely within the App-V sandbox. There's some work that MS had to do to add hooks to allow Office 2010 to interact with the local system when necessary.

jkahn2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I'm familiar with that click to run Office 2010. I think that is the start of App-V becoming more prevalent by default in Microsoft's own applications.

Tichy• 16 years ago

Isn't there already sandboxing for registry stuff in Windows 7? I really haven't followed it closely but I seem to remember reading that they give fake directories and registries to applications. So they think they mess with the real thing, but they really don't.

WorkerBee2• 16 years ago

Sandboxed Execution System ... Self Contained Applications ... Limited APIs

This sounds like a good description of Silverlight out-of-browser applications. I wonder why he didn't mention them.

What I would do if I was in charge of Windows 8 - Miguel de Icaza

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