That is not the app in the background, but a background agent. It is limited in what it can do (not the app, since it is sleeping, but the agent itself). Audio is a special-case background agent that continues to run. But it's not the app that's running. It is a background agent. This is not your father's multitasking. It's your grandfather's. It's like Win16's, the great taskswitcher.

It's not really multitasking, though, not if you mean the task switch method. IF you mean the background tasks, those are periodic, in the glacial-event realm: a couple of times and hour to run very limited jobs as a separate process from your real app, which is sleeping like a baby, with zero CPU available to it until it comes back to the foreground. The only real difference there, between what you have there now and what you had before, is the memory is still yours. Before, everything you owned was released, now, most things you get to keep (of course sockets are gone, so is the main audio (and video but you're invisible) engine). This is the "intelligent multitasking" you may have read about. I may do for most, but you can never do better; it always will only be a task switcher.

Android will still do more, and always will. That is good for those reading this. MS is betting on those that don't. Apparently, though, few don't. Very few.

Wait -- then MS's OS/3?

And it's not that bad, really, it's not. It's not popular in the west; I could count the WiMos I've come across the past few years. Head East and it's still popular.

Skype? Gone. FF? Gone. Is Opera next?

If you want security, unplug the 'net. You ain't gonna get it any other way.