Comment by asveikau
2 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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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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!
> 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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My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
4 replies →
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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And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight work on devices with even less impressive specs.