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Comment by milkytron | Hacker News Reader

WebOS.

When I used it, I saw it as a blend between Android and iOS.

It had the beauty, polish, and responsiveness that I loved on iPhones, but had the developer options and open community that Android had. It was a great product, and it's a shame that now we really only have two choices for smartphone operating system, WebOS being neither.

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So many great things about modern smartphones came from webOS — the card metaphor, universal search, swipeable notifications. The way they integrated third-party services into the OS was so seamless; I still miss the messaging app that combined texts and conversations from other services into one thread per contact.

WebOS is the Snapcaht of operating systems (course Snapchat still lives, but doesn't get anywhere near the reward of all it pioneered).

>responsiveness

No, this one isn't true. Performance was one of the biggest problems of webOS. WebOS user forums were full of posts complaining about that. UI built with HTML and JavaScript rendered by Webkit1 was way too much for 2000s hardware to handle.

The parent may mean that the design was responsive in the sense that its layout was dynamic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design

I've never heard someone refer to a website's "responsive" design as it's "responsiveness". That's almost always in regards to performance.

I was running WebOS on the HP TouchPad. And it was much more pleasant to use than Android on tablets at the time. I meant to the responsiveness from scrolling and swiping through pages.

WebOS had so much potential. Unfortunately the performance was never there. There are still devices out there with WebOS powered interfaces, I believe LG borrowed bits and parts of it for pseudo smart TV/Projectors. Even the most recent ones, on hardware that should be more than capable, just don't feel responsive.

OTOH, maybe it wasn't that great. There's a lot of kiosks, car head units, set top boxes, etc out there just running extremely stripped down versions of linux or android, just for webkit. It's extremely popular in embedded circles when it comes time to put a ui on a touch screen. (for commercial products, not hobbyists)

I always felt that for a product called webOS, Palm had one of the worst mobile browsers. The big missing feature I remember was lack of support for downloadable fonts. I don't remember the Touchpad itself being particularly polished (although the corded charger itself is supposed to be very high quality). Some of the touch stuff was pretty slick (the rubber band effect in particular), but a lot of it was pretty infuriating for me to use.

The mobile OS I miss is the most is the last iteration of BlackBerry. Although Palm had the upper hand in developer/user relations, I think that BlackBerry really got the UX right.

I don't know if I want to value your opinion on browsers of the top feature for you is custom font download.

it was the mobile browser I could access more sites' content with at the time. even flash content, for better or worse! also I could download anything and open any local file, not just what apple allowed me.

I don't know if I want to value your opinion on browsers of the top feature for you is custom font download.

Not the top feature, but one of the most glaring. At the time I was working on a site that used TypeKit and the only platform I was using that TypeKit didn't support was webOS. The whole thing seemed quite odd as they essentially yanked out a working feature of WebKit when making the browser. Flash, OTOH, was something that didn't die soon enough. I'd've much rather seen support for actual standards than Flash, but HP made a bunch of odd decisions with webOS and the Touchpad. There's some pretty delicious irony in a platform with web in the name having a mediocre web browser.

I also had a bear of a time getting email and WiFi set up for whatever reason, I relegated my Touchpad to paperweight status pretty quickly though. Even basic UI things like scrolling and copy-and-paste just didn't work all that well. Here's a review I found that highlights the distinct lack of polish that webOS had.

https://shawnblanc.net/2011/07/hp-touchpad-review/

Overall I thought RIMM/BlackBerry did a much better job with BB10 than Palm/HP did with webOS.

https://www.webosnation.com/ Some how this still ambles along even though over a decade has passed since the Pre.

I recently helped a friend wall mount a new smart TV and when the boot animation displayed WebOS, it made me incredibly disappointed about how far it had fallen.

Its the best "SmartTV" platform by far. The competition doesn't offer up much of a fight though.

Better than AndroidTV?

On my nexus player I was able to install Kodi, which I love for all the formats it supports. Roku doesn't support nearly as many formats.

I miss PalmOS, or more specifically the Graffiti text input system. I’d love to have it on the iPhone, and it would work much better on Apple Watch than its existing writing recognition.

Now you also have KaiOS which is similar to WebOS

Dieter Bohn is that you?

Nope.

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