Editing NeWS (section)

== Competition with [[X Window System]] ==

Compared to [[X Window System|X]], NeWS was vastly more powerful,{{cn|date=November 2022}} but also slower (especially for local connections). The C API was very low level and difficult to use, so most NeWS programs tended to be entirely written in PostScript.{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} Another factor in the popularity was that Sun charged a fee to license the NeWS source code, while the MIT X11 code was free of cost.

The first versions of NeWS emulated the X10 protocol by translating the calls into NeWS PostScript. Speed problems plus the existence of programs that relied on the exact pixel results of X10 calls, and the obsolescence of X10, forced Sun to release an X11/NeWS hybrid called ''[[Xnews (X11 server)|Xnews]]'' which ran an X11 server in parallel with the PostScript interpreter. This seriously degraded the NeWS interpreter performance and was not considered a very good X11 server either. Sun also implemented the OPEN LOOK user interface specification in several toolkits: The NeWS Toolkit (TNT) was an OPEN LOOK toolkit written in PostScript that ran in the NeWS server. [[OLIT]] was built on the same [[X Toolkit Intrinsics|Xt]] (X Intrinsics) base as [[Motif (software)|Motif]], and [[XView]] used the same [[API]]s as Sun's earlier [[SunView]] window system.

After it was clear that OPEN LOOK had lost out to [[Motif (software)|Motif]] in popularity, and after [[Adobe Systems|Adobe]] acquired [[FrameMaker]], Sun stopped supporting NeWS.{{CN|date=October 2023}} Products based on NeWS stopped being developed.{{When|date=October 2023}}