The true reason behind Aero Glass's removal from a former Microsoft Software Engineer

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by vista980622, Jun 7, 2015.

  1. vista980622

    vista980622 MDL Novice

    Jun 4, 2011
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    So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" (in blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/18/creating-the-windows-8-user-experience.aspx) are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them.

    --------------------------------------- Translated Quote ----------------------------------------------------

    When it was around April, 2012, I received an urgent task - to remove all Aero effects. You see, there’s only 4 months left between then and RTM release. Beta testing on ARM-based hardware pointed at an unarguable fact, that is the ARM SoC is not powerful and power-efficient enough to overcome the impact on performance and battery life.

    Therefore, for Surface RT and other RT tablets based on Tegra 3 SoC, we decided to remove Aero Glass. While the removal of Aero seems easy, it is only possible through the tight collaboration between 9 different departments.

    I still remember more than 30 product managers and testing personals participated in an internal development conference. We discussed areas ranging from DWM, to search, task bar, settings, accessibility, all the way to public APIs. We also needed to consider potential compatibility issues caused by these changes.

    So after all, most of the development task on removing Aero effects are left on me, and one of my peers. He was in charge of adapting the “Personalize” preference panel to these changes, and I was in charge of UI renderings.

    Because of the tight constrain on time and progress, I have to remove all code that renders aero glass and transparency effects, and didn’t have the time to add a flip-switch.

    This is why nobody has been able to build a convincing 3rd party tool that re-enables Aero Glass effects.

    - kwanmacher (Formal Microsoft Software Engineer), Insider information on the design of Windows 10's start menu
    (bbs.pcbeta.com/viewthread-1602617-1-1.htm)


    --------------------------------------- Original Quote (In Chinese) ----------------------------------------------------

    "大约2012年4月份的时候,我接到一个特别紧急的开发任务——去除Aero效果。要知道,这时候距离最终的RTM只有不到四个月的时间!Beta测试和硬件测试指向了一个不争的事实——就是ARM SoC不足以应付Aero效果对续航和效能带来的影响。因此,为了Surface和基于Tegra3的系统的考量上面果断决定要去除Aero Glass。Aero的移除看似简单,但其实它是9个组通力合作的结果。我还记得开发的通气会上来个不下30个项目经理和测试人员来讨论,包括DWM、搜索、任务栏、设置、辅助功能、公开API修改、兼容性等等要考虑的内容。最后的开发主要落在我和另外一个工程师的身上。他负责个性化设置的各项功能,而我负责前端的渲染。由于进度的压力,我选择了移除所有与毛玻璃和半透明效果有关的渲染代码,而没有选择加入一个开关。这也就是为什么现在并没有一个令人满意的第三方开启Aero Glass效果的工具。

    - kwanmacher"