[PaulHoule]

The idea where you can upgrade modules of a system without rebooting the whole thing is a big factor in mainframe operating systems.

The best idea from Windows Vista was organizing the whole display system around the paradigm that each application blasts out a rectangle of pixels to the compositor which in turn blasts out a rectangle of pixels to a service that writes them to the screen -- the userspace recruits the GPU to draw a rectangle of pixels.

The display system can be restarted without affecting the applications or the rest of the OS so you can upgrade your display drivers and the screen flashes and you go on your way. If the display system crashes... the screen flashes and you go on your way. Brilliant, I just wish it was all like that!

There are reasons why a software system can need to restart but properly modularized you can restart one subsystem at a time with little intrusion on the user experience.

[seniortaco]

That's fantastic. It used to be you had to restart the whole PC after a driver update.

If someone could do this for the Web Browser, I could see that potentially being a strong enough feature for users to switch from say Chrome to Firefox. "Never need to close your tabs with In Place Updates."