Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…
Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser…
That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly.
> 3D everything
That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM.
> accessibility
Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do.
> fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features
That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for a very long time. MFC has existed for an even longer time.
> support for large amounts of devices
No one asked for Windows on touchscreen anything. Microsoft decided that themselves and ruined the UX for the remaining 99% of the users that still use a mouse and a keyboard.
> backwards compatibility
That's what Microsoft does historically, nothing new here.
> browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves
No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay.