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Re:Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Win... by WorldMaker on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:50PM (#11988946)
One of the things I thought Windows 8 did really right was trying to instill into applications the lifecycle that they could be force closed/rebooted at any time and should be good at saving and restoring state across application starts. This is good beyond just system restarts and good in general to know that applications would typically come back to where you left off after the system losing connectivity or going to sleep or unloading an application to save memory/CPU while you aren't actively using it.

The complaints about this lifecycle model from app developers is that is hard to program for. Windows 8 was also strict enough forcing this lifecycle (closing out applications sometimes seconds after minimizing and attempting to restore them quickly on window restore) that it showed how bad developers can be at programming hard things like proper app lifecycle management, so they begged Windows to be less strict about it.

(That was one of the magic things about Windows 8 that Windows 10 doesn't quite replicate: minimizing a properly built application and watching the application's memory and CPU usage quickly drop to zero.)

Re:Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Win... by TeMPOraL on Monday June 27, 2016 @05:45PM (#11989766)
That's the very reason I didn't use any Metro apps on my work computer. They would get swapped out of memory and killed whenever I ALT+TABbed from them. Not joking. Every time I wanted to switch to a normal app for a second and then back to the Metro one, the latter would have to "restore" itself (and guess what, it never restored to the point I last left it).

Of course I know the reason - that's because my machine is memory constrained, I routinely run on ~90% RAM usage. But hey, that 8GB of RAM isn't here for vacation, it's to be used.

Personally, I find the mobile app lifecycle - which is where they took the idea from - to be incredibly annoying. I like to have control both when applications die and when they start up (which, on Android, is utterly unpredictable).

Re:Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Win... by emp_zealoth on Monday June 27, 2016 @06:28PM (#11990028)
Oh, but it's great! I can't browse most sites on my android because the LMK for some reason starts with the damn browser. I love it! /s
Re:Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Win... by fake-name on Monday June 27, 2016 @05:23PM (#11989612)
The problem with this lifecycle assumption is that there is no way to opt out.

I have a "metro" style SSH application, and windows regularly decides it should close it, which kills my active SSH sessions.

I understand that they removed the ability to opt-out to force developers to change to a more appropriate model, but there are cases where a task cannot be suspended (because, for example, it's interacting with another computer). Having to re-log-in to my ssh session the 4th or 5th time in an hour is absolutely infuriating.

Re:Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Win... by WorldMaker on Monday June 27, 2016 @06:08PM (#11989916)
You can opt out by creating a background process. The thing that makes that part complicated is that there is a background process lifecycle to learn (including interactions between a UI process and background process). Also, Windows wants a bit more of an explicit knowledge than say classic Win32 about what the background process is for so it can best manage it.

The support for background processes continues to improve. Windows 10, for instance, now supports a "single instance" background processing model where background processes can be seen as an invocation of the UI app (if already running) and vice versa (the UI app is presented as an invocation to the background process if that is already running) with hand-offs from one to the other, simplifying the programming of some of the interactions between background and UI for some apps.