Providing an OS feature only to first-party programs is a plainly anticompetitive practice. Using your privileged position in one market (cell phones/cell phone operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (smart phone applications) that you withhold from your competitors is a textbook case.
I wanted to be outraged at apple, but I really can't. Read WinAPI documentation and try to count all "reserved" parameters for example. OS developers build features just for internal use all the time.
Granted, this is just UI tweak so I'm not convinced it has to be private, but they probably just don't want to have to maintain that forever.
The key distinction is the withholding from your competitors part. WinAPI may have a ton of features labelled "pls no use thx" but MS doesn't block you from distributing a program that uses them anyway.
Yeah, this seems reasonable to me. The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. I guess you could make the argument that they are choosing to work on stuff like this instead, but I think that’s a weak argument.
Wait so are all non-standard CSS attributes "anticompetitive"? This seems like wild hyperbole.
Is Google's "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" also anticompetitive? Should we ban the current practice of shipping proprietary CSS attributes while sometimes also proposing them for standardization?
It's just really hard for me to read that as a legit complaint.
You can use `-webkit-tap-highlight-color` on your website or PWA and distribute it any way you want. It will just not work in non-webkit browsers like Firefox.
What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).
Not sure it is "plainly anticompetitive" in the legal sense. In the US, the laws on anti-competitive practices are the Sherman Act and the Clayton act. To be anticompetitive, the courts use the "per se" rule and the "rule of reason". "per se" rule covers things which are specifically listed in the laws as being anticompetitive (eg price fixing).
This isn't in the list of per se anticompetitive practises so it would need to be covered by the "rule of reason". That would require someone to demonstrate actual harm to competition that flowed directly from the illegal nature of the practise and was not compensated by some offsetting procompetitive benefit and there is no less restrictive alternative.
I don't see how a CSS property would meet the standard of actual harm to competition, especially since noone is stopping you from making your own liquid glass css if you want to (as far as I can see).
But there's no evidence yet that it's being used by first-party programs, e.g. by GarageBand or Pages or Mail.app.
It's also quite likely that it's a) not being used at all, and the private API is just for internal testing until it's ready to be made public, and/or b) used by certain OS components that aren't competing with third-party apps (e.g. somewhere in the Settings panel).
And while I agree with your assertion in theory, some cosmetic styling is probably about the least important, most trivial example you could come up with... can't really get myself worked up about this one.
What are your thoughts on computer hardware which is much more restrictive? Video game consoles, for example, require all code to be cryptographically signed, meaning that third parties can't publish any software whatsoever without the blessing of the console manufacturer.
I'm generally opposed to that as well. Agreeing with Muromec's reply, I don't think it is necessarily anticompetitive in the case where the console vendor doesn't favor its first party games, but of course all three do that in practice. The situation is somewhat mitigated by the existence of a flourishing open market alternative (PC games).
More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.
If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.
I think there is line that a company can cross: using a locked-down appearance setting to make an app look like it is from the company.
For example, if there was a glowing light on the edge of the phone that only lights up with stock apps and company apps, and that signfies for security that an app belongs to a company, that is ok.
I don't consider design/appearance to be a feature. YMD.
Tech was always a business. What this comment is bringing out is the people who see preferred technical choices as some kind of morality play. They aren’t. They never were. It’s childish to believe such things.
Based on other Chrome threads here, we do need to make sure that Apple maintains their exclusive monopoly on browser on iOS to prevent these things from happening. Right? Right?! :P
HN has one of the largest online populations of amateur lawyers with some of the least correct legal opinions in the world. This is one of many, many examples.
Isn't the article saying they added a new css element, but it's not restricted to apple apps only really, just not in documentation yet? for example, this article is preview documentation, of a sort?
No, it says it is restricted. You need to set a private attribute on the webview to enable it. And if you interact with private APIs your app will be rejected in review.
With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps? And how much advantage does some shiny reflection (which, btw, could also be attained by writing the effect yourself) offer them over that competition? It must be something big and obvious, otherwise there's no way it's illegal, but I can't think of it.
If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.
Google or any open source map product. And actually, if we use the SCOTUS approved DOJ v MSFT consent decree as precedent, any app that can't use this private API component would be an impacted party.
I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..
95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.
This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces
It’s a way they can make their webview-based apps look “native” more easily than a third party can. If you try out a third-party app and it looks less well integrated visually than a similar first-party app, then the latter has a competitive advantage because of that.
Well for starters, no one else is allowed to publish a browser with their own engine on the AppStore, and they've hampered sideloading for years. In a vacuum, it might be reasonable to block any third-party browser engines, or to put something special in their own that no one else can use on the phone, but combining those is just intentional sabotage. And yes, I know that this specific CSS property isn't all that important, but having an argument about how much they're allowed to intentionally sabotage other browsers on their phones is at best a misguided distraction from the point that they shouldn't be doing it in the first place (and not a particularly good defense either; try arguing with a cop who pulls you over for speeding that the law you broke wasn't really that important and see if it gets you out of the ticket).
> With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps?
With every other app using a web view.
> without referring to monopolies
Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.
I'll concede if you can name one webview that is integrated seamlessly. Maybe the average person wouldn't realise but I think we'd have seen lots of articles about it here. It would be a standard rebuttal to every webview debate, "but Foo is implemented as a webview so it can be done".
Which is probably exactly why this was added. The cheap way to usually tell if someone is using a 3rd party UI toolkit, is to start tweaking the system theming and see if the application follows some scaling/color changes correctly.
In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.
Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.
There's also, in there somewhere, a corollary about how you don't notice the webviews which don't stick out but just don't feel right. Like, someone mentioned Settings app in MacOS might use them because the icons don't load fast enough.
I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea.
If I had to guess, probably in the iCloud settings inside of the Settings app. Also in the App Store/Music/TV account page (when you tap on your avatar in the top right of the app.) A bunch of those pages have quite well hidden web views pretending to be native ones, mainly loading things from the iTunes backend services (the give away is normally that you can long press <a> links and a web page preview pops up.) It's probably being used for the user guide inside of the Tips app as well.
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.
This is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
I often suspect things in Settings, esp. account/iCloud section to be webviews, just based on how they load (icons appearing a short moment after the page opens for example).
When you tap some of the menu items in the “Saved to iCloud” section, they don’t have the normal grey item highlight that happens with the rest of the settings app.
I’m sure there are many apps like the Apple Store app and parts of the App Store that pull in web views. That’s most likely what this is for. Probably parts of News, Music, Games apps as well.
Actually it does not. It used to, but then was rewritten. The Accessibility Inspector app can be used to see what's the class of the UI elements, if you want to check.
Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility.
I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some things on the websites I maintain in advance of it going public, and while there are some issues here and there I think the overall direction to add more personality back into the OS is a good one. Normies will love it.
I like the glass effects and aesthetics, but I think the functionality in a lot of the apps isn't as good as it was. A lot of things that were easy-to-reach buttons are now tucked away in menus, and harder to find.
That always depends on how difficult discoverability is. For example if you're designing for something like Apple Watch there's very limited place for stuff, so you either pack it or you find ways to only show what's most important, using gestures or menus to do other stuff.
Mobile apps having less UI elements immediately visible is not all bad. The hard part of new UX concepts like the new iOS camera button sliding feature is that it's new. Users aren't immediately familiar with it. Not every OS functionality uses it consistently. Etc.
It's probably better to wait a year or two before critiquing Liquid Glass. Change is always risky and takes time to fully roll out and the ecosystem to adopt it widely.
I noticed this in safari where the bookmark icon used to be one click was now two. Fortunately you can change it back in the settings by switching the tab layout (whatever that means)
Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.
As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.
My suspicion is that genpop is not going to like it, broadly, mostly because the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies. People just don't think like that; most people view these systems as means to an end, and anything that isn't in service to that is, at best, simply an interesting diversion for the first few days.
One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.
In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.
I don't think so, I think the general population gets happy and excited by new things, because they believe it to be somehow better than the old thing. A new cool visual refresh of the OS is something that people gravitate towards, even when it's mostly a superficial restyling hiding decades of cruft (Windows 11)
> the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies
I am not so sure. It might even be the opposite. Techies and designers gave us the flat UI aesthetic, Material UI, Windows Metro design, etc. Techies also nitpick design and aesthetics far more than average folks do. Techies and designers derided Windows XP, but most average users thought it was "cute" and "fun" compared to the "boring" previous design. It is definitely the most memorable release in the past 30 years as far as UI goes. This iOS version could wind up being similar after so many years of the flat UI.
The bugs/kinks are a good point though, and I have noticed some UX changes too that I am unsure about. This is the first complete UI redo in long time for iOS, so I am sure they will get these things worked out over time.
I'm sure they know with the latest OS release that a lot of people are going to want to start using this immediately, perhaps they want to work out the public use of it internally first?
There's definitely some unfounded accusations going on in this thread about this too. Maybe they're right? Maybe they're wrong?
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere.
Why must they be using it somewhere? The amount of dead code and features in common software is ridiculous. They might've changed directions 5 times through this, and the CSS property came in #2 and went out of use in #4…
Love or hate liquid glass, the paradigm shift from "UI chrome is a wrapper around app content" to "UI is overlayed on top of app content" seems like the future. It's well aligned with AR and better separates UI layout from content for different screen sizes.
I'm neutral on this first implementation (some good, some bad). But I think the approach will be picked up by essentially everyone. Good news for you, there's nothing saying the overlay UI model has to be transparent. Some will probably be opaque but still floating.
Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.
Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.
With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.
Younger generation is obsessed with nostalgia for Aero/Glass and that whole era's aesthetic. It will definitely become a trend, if not for that then because Apple did it and the industry has lost all innovation outside of "copy whatever Apple does."
As a fan of aero, I hope Google copies the Apple theme with their own aero theme.
There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.
Readit News
Granted, this is just UI tweak so I'm not convinced it has to be private, but they probably just don't want to have to maintain that forever.
“Timmy got away with it. I should get away with it, too.” -Elementary school students
But this is exactly why you SHOULD be outraged.
Is Google's "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" also anticompetitive? Should we ban the current practice of shipping proprietary CSS attributes while sometimes also proposing them for standardization?
It's just really hard for me to read that as a legit complaint.
What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).
If Apple uses this CSS liquid glass effect in their apps, it'll pass App Store review just fine.
Do you see the issue now?
Dead Comment
This isn't in the list of per se anticompetitive practises so it would need to be covered by the "rule of reason". That would require someone to demonstrate actual harm to competition that flowed directly from the illegal nature of the practise and was not compensated by some offsetting procompetitive benefit and there is no less restrictive alternative.
I don't see how a CSS property would meet the standard of actual harm to competition, especially since noone is stopping you from making your own liquid glass css if you want to (as far as I can see).
It's also quite likely that it's a) not being used at all, and the private API is just for internal testing until it's ready to be made public, and/or b) used by certain OS components that aren't competing with third-party apps (e.g. somewhere in the Settings panel).
And while I agree with your assertion in theory, some cosmetic styling is probably about the least important, most trivial example you could come up with... can't really get myself worked up about this one.
Apple does plenty of bad things, and many are worse than this, but it doesn't mean it's not fair to point out this one is bad, too.
It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.
More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.
If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.
For example, if there was a glowing light on the edge of the phone that only lights up with stock apps and company apps, and that signfies for security that an app belongs to a company, that is ok.
I don't consider design/appearance to be a feature. YMD.
Look at the m3/4 macs they are insane machines because even the hardware is unified.
If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.
I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..
95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.
This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces
With every other app using a web view.
> without referring to monopolies
Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.
the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly
- people who have gone down the webview path, and know how difficult it is to do well
- people who have been told they can simply package their webapp into a native application
You can probably guess which group has more people
In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.
Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.
I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.
I think that's mostly a brand narrative/myth. MacOS has always had warts at any given time.
Deleted Comment
If I had to guess, probably in the iCloud settings inside of the Settings app. Also in the App Store/Music/TV account page (when you tap on your avatar in the top right of the app.) A bunch of those pages have quite well hidden web views pretending to be native ones, mainly loading things from the iTunes backend services (the give away is normally that you can long press <a> links and a web page preview pops up.) It's probably being used for the user guide inside of the Tips app as well.
That's where I'd be looking at least.
This is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424
Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility.
I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some things on the websites I maintain in advance of it going public, and while there are some issues here and there I think the overall direction to add more personality back into the OS is a good one. Normies will love it.
Mobile apps having less UI elements immediately visible is not all bad. The hard part of new UX concepts like the new iOS camera button sliding feature is that it's new. Users aren't immediately familiar with it. Not every OS functionality uses it consistently. Etc.
It's probably better to wait a year or two before critiquing Liquid Glass. Change is always risky and takes time to fully roll out and the ecosystem to adopt it widely.
Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.
As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.
> Normies will love it.
Here’s a sample of one hating it.
https://www.threads.com/@chrispirillo/post/DOpUPrIiYdX
The bar is high
One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.
In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.
I am not so sure. It might even be the opposite. Techies and designers gave us the flat UI aesthetic, Material UI, Windows Metro design, etc. Techies also nitpick design and aesthetics far more than average folks do. Techies and designers derided Windows XP, but most average users thought it was "cute" and "fun" compared to the "boring" previous design. It is definitely the most memorable release in the past 30 years as far as UI goes. This iOS version could wind up being similar after so many years of the flat UI.
The bugs/kinks are a good point though, and I have noticed some UX changes too that I am unsure about. This is the first complete UI redo in long time for iOS, so I am sure they will get these things worked out over time.
It's just terrible.
I'm sure they know with the latest OS release that a lot of people are going to want to start using this immediately, perhaps they want to work out the public use of it internally first?
There's definitely some unfounded accusations going on in this thread about this too. Maybe they're right? Maybe they're wrong?
Why must they be using it somewhere? The amount of dead code and features in common software is ridiculous. They might've changed directions 5 times through this, and the CSS property came in #2 and went out of use in #4…
I'm neutral on this first implementation (some good, some bad). But I think the approach will be picked up by essentially everyone. Good news for you, there's nothing saying the overlay UI model has to be transparent. Some will probably be opaque but still floating.
First, AR is currently aspirational at best. After decades of failures.
Second, overlaying translucid UI over content makes separation of UI from content worse, not better.
Windows Aero tried that 2 decades ago and, while it looked cool, they reverted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.
Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.
With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.
There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.