[gedy]

> it also makes it non-updateable separately from the OS itself, which slows the spread of developments.

Hasn't it always been this way with native desktop applications using the OS vendor's UI toolkit? What I hear some folks describe as "the old days" of Windows, Mac, etc.

[Someone]

On the Mac, it was non-updateable separately from the hardware for a while (large parts of the UI toolkit shipped in ROM) :-)

I think there also always was a new OS version for the new hardware, though, with the new hardware not running at all on older versions.

The high speed at which computer tech improved at the time made that a bit of a smaller issue.

[duskwuff]

> On the Mac, it was non-updateable separately from the hardware for a while (large parts of the UI toolkit shipped in ROM) :-)

Apple had a mechanism (ROvr resources) to allow the system software on disk to override components from ROM.