What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages.
Things like:
- If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can
- Menus should be tree structures
- Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable
As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may well have several different styles all imitated from office, but at least I knew what everything did and when it was slow at least it did what I expected.
This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen. Nowadays that has no chance of working because even to log in I need to press enter or click some button (which one depends on how I logged in previously, maybe) before I can even start typing and doing so eats a random amount of keystrokes while the damn log in screen loads to do its one damn job.
We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.
I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day.
Yet we risk desktop experiences becoming less useful due to the UI becoming "dumber" as we keep shoehorning websites onto the desktop. Website UI is dumb. It's mouse driven, keyboard is an afterthought. There's no consistency, and you have to re-invent the wheel every time to get the details right (almost never happens).
>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.
I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers.
The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen.
For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser and all its responsibilities - but rather cross-platform, reliable, predictable on all platforms - i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.
This is attainable and there are many great examples of apps which are in fact, old wheels not re-invented, which still work for their particular user market.
I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.
The cognitive load of doing a web app that can do all the things a native app can do, is equivalent to the load required to build a cross-platform app using native frameworks, so ..
>i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.
Based on my experience, I would be quite reluctant to rely on any non-native cross-platform desktop UI framework that is not web-based. These tend to be either less performant, look outdated or are bug-ridden.
> I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.
No. I want things like keyboard shortcuts to reflect the platform norms of where the app is running (macOS in my case). A shared core is fine, but the UI framework must be native to be acceptable. Ghostty is a "gold standard" there.
This is why most web apps are lowest-common-denominator annoyances that I will not use.
Indeed, if the framework is sensible, keyboard shortcuts reflecting platform norms is entirely attainable in a manner that developers don't have to bother with it, much, if they don't want to.
There are plenty of examples of cross-platform UI's surviving the hotkey dance and attaining user satisfaction. There are of course poor examples too, but that's a reflection of care, not effort.
Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.
Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the novice users who, over time, become power users through repetitive usage. If there are no user efficiency gains to be had through experience in a UI, then it just prevents the emergence of power users. Users just have to wait until a product manager or designer somewhere notices their pain and create a new feature through 10x the effort it would have taken to simply maintain the lower level shortcuts (e.g. keyboard accelerators, simple step automations).
Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_
Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well.
Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.
Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it.
God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.
Is it mismanaged? Sure, they spend a fair amount on administration. Sure, they spend about 10% on Mozilla Foundation stuff. But they still spend ~2/3 of revenue on software development.
And they're somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If they try to evolve their current platform, power users bitch. If they don't evolve their current platform, they lose casual users to ad-promoted alternatives (Chrome and Edge).
And they don't really have the money to do a parallel ground-up rewrite.
The most interesting thing I could see on the horizon is building a user-owned browsing agent (in the AI sense), but then they'd get tarred and feathered for chasing AI.
Part of Mozilla's problem is that the browser is already pretty figured out. After tabs and speed and ad blocking, there weren't any killer features.
If you become a power user you realize that nothing matches the power of the command line. And at that point you also realize that are better OSes that allow you to fully explode the true computing power that is terribly limited and constrained by a GUI.
Nonsense. Do you read and write your email using the command line? I use Mutt and Vim for that, and that’s not the command line. GUI with power-user support is just as efficient as Mutt and Vim. Did you use curl to read this thread and submit your comment? I use Firefox with Vimium C, which allows most web pages to be navigated and operated efficiently by keyboard.
Well, Alt+Tab in Windows is supposed to switch windows. That's unless you're in Microsoft Edge where obviously, it switches tabs. Inconsistent and annoying.
Browser tabs are the fault here and browsers are trying to be OS environment, so Alt+Tab is useful for major task switching. I agree it's inconsistent and annoying, but I like Alt+Tab as a way to try to find the window I'm writing that email to someone.
I hate this too. You can turn it off. In Settings, go to System->Multitasking and change "Show tabs from apps when snapping or pressing Alt+Tab" to "Don't show tabs."
As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree.
In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something about how, for reasons unknown to him, the current version of Logos required advanced graphics capabilities (I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he had learned that the slowness had something to do with graphics). Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text, presumably with some editing for adding notes and such. At the time, I just bought him another laptop.
A few years later, I happened to read that Logos version 4 was built on WPF. Then, remembering my brother, I found this Logos forum thread:
This shows that Logos users were discussing the performance of Logos on machines with different graphics hardware. For a program that was all about displaying and editing text, it shouldn't have mattered. WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. And that's just the one example I know about.
"WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. "
OTOH WPF is today surprisingly strong GUI platform if you just want to get your Windows GUI out there.
It runs really nicely even on low end hardware. All the nice styling and blending techniques now _just work_ even on the most cheap low end laptop.
The fact it's over decade old means all the LLM:s actually know really well how to use it.
So you can just guide your LLM to follow Microsoft best practices on logic development and styling and "just add this button here, this button here, add this styling here" etc.
It's the least annoying GUI development experience I've ever had (as a dev, non-designer).
Of course not portable out of the box (avalonia is then the ticket there).
If you want 3D, you can just plug in OpenTK with OpenGL 3.3. Decades old _but good enough for almost everything_ if you are not writing a high perf game.
Really, WPF plus OpenTK is a really robust and non-surprising development platform that runs from old laptops (eg. T14 Gen 2 per my testing) onwards.
I've been doing a sideproject using WPF and OpenTK - .net works really great - here is a sample video of the whole stack (from adashape.com)
I had the misfortune of writing a complicated WPF app from scratch circa 2010-2011. Performance using the WPF widgets was terrible compared to HTML/Javascript/Blink; we ended throwing away most of the WPF code other than the main shell and a few dialogs, reimplementing the importantant stuff with immediate-mode Direct3D/Direct2D to get the necessary speed.
I recall wasting a lot of time staring at decompiled .NET bytecode trying to understand how to work around many problems with it, and it was clear from the decompiler output that WPF's architecture was awful...
A notable example I remember from around 2010 was when Evernote dropped WPF, supposedly due to blurry text issues but probably also performance (remember when we called it EverBloat?)
Can't find the original blog post about it but here's a couple mentions of it:
Blurry fonts was my main issue with WPF. I get headaches from blurry text and the colour bleeding from ClearType just makes the headache worse.
Fortunately for me, I had mostly switched to Linux by that time already, where it was at the time relatively easy to just enable grey scale AA with full hinting.
In recent years this has gotten worse again with modern software incorrectly assuming everyone has a High DPI monitor. My trick has been to use bitmap fonts with no AA, but that broke in recent versions of electron, where bitmap fonts are now rendered blurry. So I had to stay on an old version of vscode from last year, and I will be looking to switch to another editor (high time anyway for other reasons).
It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option).
But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.
I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?
FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.
My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.
I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1]
Your argument presupposes that we should accept escalating baseline hardware requirements as good or even necessary, for a desktop computing world that was, from the user's perspective, doing pretty much the same thing as before. I reject that.
What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.
The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.
It has been associated with 3D rendering, but given that things like the S3 86C911 are listed on the Wikipedia GPU page, saying "Accelerated GUIs don't need GPU" feels like attempting to win an argument by insisting on a term definition that is significantly divergent from standard vulgar usage [1], which doesn't provide any insight to the problem originally being discussed.
[1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'
Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.
GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.
Yes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.
I had an Xperia for a while but kept my iPhone and then installed the iOS 26 beta on it. Expectation was that it would run but be pretty painful. Surprisingly, even the beta ran so fine that I sold the Xperia and switched back to iOS. And it's still my daily driver.
2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are:
1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shouldn't have completely abandoned those markets.
2) They did not back 1 UI framework for a long time (I mean 10 years+), instead they did significant changes to their UI framework strategy every 3-4 years. It takes a huge time for developers to trust, learn and develop complex and polished apps in a UI framework. Also it takes a long time for a UI framework to become mature. If you change your UI strategy every few years, you will never have complex and polished apps written with it.
To be honest I am not sure if Windows will ever be able to recover in the long term and keep its market share. The only reason it seems to be alive is because enterprise runs on Windows and it is hard to change that.
I feel like an Apple + Google dominance will be more likely in the long term for desktop operating systems. I am not sure if Google will be able to avoid the first mistake I wrote above but they are working on bringing Android to desktop. It is a good idea but it requires at least 10 years of supporting and polishing it despite not getting much traction. But if Google persists, we might be all using MacOS and Android on desktop 20 years from now.
Yeah, a striking difference between windows and linux at this point is that the linux UI frameworks are hyper stable. If I want to make a linux desktop app, I'll choose QT or GTK. Heck, if I want to make a windows and macOS app, I'll probably choose QT or GTK.
What do I chose with Windows? Who knows. It literally changes every time I look into it.
That's just insane.
It's gotten so bad that probably the right way to do a modern windows desktop app is react native. At least you could predict that it will stay up to date with the ever shifting decisions at MS to create and abandon UI frameworks.
All the various windows UI frameworks are stable, but not supported and not receiving new updates.
That's the problem.
And what makes matters worse is because of all the shifts, the documentation throughout MS is in just varying states of outdated. For example, this document which recommends using UWP [1] to handle high dpi problems. But of course, UWP (which was the right way to do gui in Win 10) is now defunct for win ui.
WPF is also stable. Microsoft's UI strategy is similar to keeping all of Motif, GTK2, Qt5 alive while engineering new stuff into Qt6 without deprecating anything.
Btw Linux UI is not by any measure stable. It is the furthest thing from stable.
On Windows, I would chose WinForms. Even today, even over WPF. It's as stable as QT and GTK, still supported, and has a large community of contributors and 3rd party vendors.
They had great devices before iOS/Android and then again after. That Lumia phone was awesome. They had one of the best cameras. Their live tiles they had on the phone & desktop OS were really good. Even Windows 8 had a cool CRM app in its infancy that tried to link all your social media & email accounts together.
They killed all of that even with multiple chances to win people over. It seemed they wanted to win the new markets in less than a year.
For as much flack as Google gets for short lived awesome products, Microsoft is right up there. Which is why when they've announced new things like Blazor, MAUI, etc., no one expects them to live long enough to trust their apps on.
I also strongly question their enterprise MOAT when most kids are growing up on Apple & Google devices the past decade. Microsoft seems to lack long term strategy.
The deeper problem is that Microsoft keeps trying to solve GUI consistency at the framework layer instead of the design system layer. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI -- each one a new framework, each one eventually abandoned.
Apple solved this by treating the design system as the product and letting the framework be invisible. Microsoft has it backwards every time.
> The deeper problem is that Microsoft keeps trying to solve GUI consistency at the framework layer
I really don't think that's the fundamental issue.
TFA points out, and I agree, that the fundamental issue is political: competing teams across different divisions coming up with different solutions to solve the same problem that are then all released and pushed in a confusing mishmash of messages.
I haven't written a line of code for a Windows desktop app or extension since early 2014, when the picture was already extremely confusing. I have no idea where I'd begin now.
My choice seems to be either a third party option (like Electron, which is an abomination for a "native" Windows app), or something from Microsoft that feels like it's already deprecated (in rhetoric if not in actuality).
It's a million miles from the in the box development experience of even the late zero years where the correct and current approach was still readily apparent and everything you needed to move forward with development was available from the moment you opened Visual Studio.
There's just so much friction nowadays, starting with the mental load of figuring out the most acceptable/least annoying/most likely still to be supported in 5 - 10 years tech to use for solving the problem.
Honestly, things like Electron are quite literally the problem!
All of people’s modern desktop woes begin and end at the browser. Here’s why: the late 2010’s push into the cloud made JavaScript all-the-rage. A language the creator made in pretty much a weekend coding session.
There naturally is major business incentives powering this. SaaS made things MUCH easier for delivering software.
Fast forward 15 years and MSFT is full in on TypeScript. It’s a disease that starts with MsOffice and percolates to the whole OS (same as what’s happening in copilot).
.Net is actually elegant in many ways. You have PowerShell, VB .Net, C#, F# etc. languages of many paradigms all targeting the same bytecode (and supported by the OS).
And this is being replace by a fun little JavaScript thingy.
That may be how JavaScript started, but unless your claim is that JavaScript hasn't changed at all in the thirty years or so since then, your argument is a complete non-sequitur.
Yeah, thank you. Also, JavaScript today means TypeScript—an arguably extremely capable type system actively developed by Microsoft—and several, modern runtimes with a big standard library and solid asynchronous primitives. There are a lot worse scripting languages out there.
Folks misunderstand the whole point just because I mention TypeScript. Sure it’s a capable and elegant language. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bloated monstrosity on the desktop.
Think about it: it transpiles to JavaScript. Even if it’s the most elegant language in the world doesn’t change the fact that it’s a world of bloat.
Stacks on stacks on stacks. And yet people are complaining about .Net? Come on. Lol
I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft.
Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years.
And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official frameworks. Quite contrary, you basically got the switches from PowerPC to x86 to ARM almost for free for example.
Apple is not perfect by any means, but in this regard I truly think they are ahead of Microsoft.
Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst.
The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite.
And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....
If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote?
My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well.
Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decision when there were not many remaining to take.
That's a different issue. Things like Electron are popular not because native development is buggy, but because most developers these days are web developers. They know Javascript. They've never written anything in C/C++ or even the slightly friendlier Swift, Rust, or Go. Electron lets people who only know the Web make desktop apps.
> If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS
That is not how the decision making for cross-platform works. You choose those alternatives knowing that they are crap in many respects, yet accept the trade offs because you want to save money on dev hours.
This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app.
This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.
The YouTube app has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple.
Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck.
YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.
The YouTube app does the exact same thing on Android. I ran into this just yesterday on my gf's phone, as I'd just added her to my family plan, tried to verify the settings on her phone, and it trapped me on an upsell screen for YT Premium that I had to kill the app to get out of.
Maybe just the circles I run in but these are not evergreen questions in my experience. I don't even know what "go back" is supposed to mean here, or for that matter what it would mean in a Windows application. Is there a system level "go back" in WinAmp/Excel/SimCity/Photoshop I've never seen before?
In iOS, task manager and closure can't be overridden. You swipe right to return to previous application. You can swipe left for a couple of seconds if you didn't intend to do that.
You swipe up and remove the application from the stack, all processes of the application is killed.
Background processing has strict limits, and you need permissions to run longer than that, and for some use cases, there are no recourse. OS swaps you out or freezes the app.
If you want an app to work in the background, don't kill it, period. Push notifications are handled by the OS and is not hindered by this.
I'm not using Reddit in any capacity since they have started giving their content for LLM training, so I can't help you with that, but looking at 4-5 third party applications right now, they all have a left arrow at top left to go back.
They all are very different applications and have very different designs, yet the arrow is there.
To be honest, I baffled at your question for a second or so, because I never thought about that, yet the method is so universal that I was not thinking about it at all.
I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.
It's not just that you need to get used to gestures, it's that they are not discoverable at all, and that they can be awkward to perform with mobility issues, old hands, short fingers, etc. It's easy to make the wrong gesture, eg. the phone detects a swipe down instead of left to right, more so if you are holding it in one hand, so it's finicky and frustrating to have to rely on it as the only way of doing a common action. Why is it so wrong to have a simple navigation bar, it doesn't take up any more space than the hideous notch at the top?
I could get used to touch gestures if they were more consistent and tolerant enough for wrong inputs. It may work in one app but not another. One app expects me to swipe from left to right to go back, another wants me to swipe from top to bottom for the same thing. It may mark an email as unread if I start the swipe a pixel too far away from the screen edge. On Android swipe gestures may vary even on different phones from the same brand.
In iOS, tapping the top edge of the screen means scroll to the top. Except in the Photo app, where it means "scroll to the top of the current section, or almost the top, or do nothing and make the user guess if they just tapped the wrong way".
Meanwhile when there's an X button or arrow to the left I always know what it's going to do aside from one or two overly creative Android apps.
Is that what's going on? So many touch gestures seem to rely on landing in the right 2mm diameter area, but the minimum reliable resolution for touch seems to be a 4mm diameter circle. It's even worse for my father, even though cognitively, he would have no trouble understanding the hypothetical requirement. It's also noticeably worse during the depths of winter.
It's not "getting used to", I feel like that gesture is less practical. It involves or using the "circle" to assist on how to use the gesture (creating a black void on the screen that you need to plan your use of the phone around) or having the swipe that 1) is not as reliable in my opinion and 2) can be triggered accidentally
For me is like claiming that touch screens on cars are the future and people are too old to get used to it.
I feel that some people are just forgetting what the reason it's easy for them is because they learned that "swipe based UI" ages ago.
When I get handed iPhone I have no clue on how to even open an additional tab in Safari and any finger gestures do not do the things what I expect nor there is a lick of indication on how to do something. It's all just a memorized magical incantations at this point. But hey you are familiar with them so it's easy to bash on everyone who is not in yours eco-system.
You can't just take 40 years of Win32 apps and add the Metro design language, touchscreen compatibility, or dark mode system-wide. WPF nowadays has a skin that imitates WinUI, so at least Microsoft is trying.
The deeper problem is that all these layers are still in use somewhere within Windows. Try to give your Ethernetcard a fixed IP Address for example. On your way to the correct setting (which has visually looked that way when I was still going to school) you will move through maybe 3 or 4 layers of UI paradigms like a freaking media archeologist. Each of the newer layers dumbed things down and kept the old thing as a fallback.
Meanwhile in MacOS they dumb things down without a fallback.
The only people who appear to make serious attempts at improving the usability of computers are the likes of KDE and other Linux desktop environments. It used to be the way that Linux was the thing you used despite its shortcomings compared to commercial OSs..
WinForms is a layer built on top of raw Win32. So it's not portable.
Even though Wine exists, Win32 calls can only be made from Win32 programs, not native Linux programs. So a WinForms app using the latest dotnet would need to run the Windows version of dotnet under Wine, and not use the Linux version of dotnet.
True, but: Microsoft haven't made a better UI framework that's portable to Windows yet. Everything after WPF has near zero adoption, including (critically important!) by Microsoft itself.
Mono used to have libwine embedded. You know, libwine exists as a library running and compiling Win32 natively under Unix. Instead of PE binaries you would run ELF Linux ones, but with nearly the same outcome.
Every time I tried following alone with the winelib/winemaker documentation, I always ended up with an ELF that had to be invoked using "wine" to run. Nothing that could self-load any of the wine dependencies.
Snide and subjective comments aside, you’ve clearly missed their point.
Even if you take away subjective opinions on Liquid Glass, the point is that the core system updates things across the board.
Unless apps have implemented custom drawing, you get a consistent-ish UI (for better or worse) across the system, whereas with windows you are beholden to whatever hodge podge of UI frameworks were chosen at the given time.
I don’t think Microsoft’s approach to perpetually support old apps is unequivocally a good thing. It seems to be getting them into a deeper and deeper mess over time.
As a consumer I prefer Apples approach. If I were an industrial customer relying on old software to operate my machines i would prefer Microsoft’s approach.
The size and losition of the traffic lights control is not dependent of the os the app runs on but on the os the app was compiled on. So things are not updated across the board
Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines.
They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation.
Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen.
Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seeing someone suggesting some arcane combination of steps to do some basic things with replies to the effect of "OMG thank you so much, this needs to be known by more people!!!"
I see frame drops when opening the start menu on a clean Windows 11 install on my work laptop (Intel Quad with 32GB memory from two years ago). I have seen the same on 3D Vcache Ryzens on systems from people who claimed there was not lag or sluggishness. It was there and they saw it once pointed out, the standards for Windows users have simply gotten so low that they’ve gotten used to the status quo.
On MacOS, meanwhile, Finder refuses to update any major changes done via CLI operations without a full Finder restart and the search indexing is currently broken, after prior versions of Ventura where stable functionality wise. I am however firm that Liquid Glass is a misstep and more made by the Figma crowd then actual UX experts. It is supposed to look good, rather than have any UX advantage or purpose compared to e.g skeuomorphism.
KDE and Gnome are the only projects that are still purely UX focused, though preferences can make one far more appealing than the other.
My work laptop will stall on resize constantly, and I suspect it is due to the mess of security and backup software. Windows does have an ecosystem problem.
I am also baffled by the multiple control points. I can log in to mail in 3 places. Settings have 3 with different uis....it is gross.
I remember when ChatGPT exploded and Bing had it integrated, the idea was brilliant because unlike ChatGPT it didn't have information cut-off since it can access the web. I was very excited to ditch Google for AI chat with web access.
How did MS actually implemented it though? After a few messages the chat is blocked because MS did not choose to walk the extra mile and maybe compact the context so that their product can be actually usable.
Of course OpenAI, Perplexity and others later implemented that properly and its integral part of modern AI chat and I actually ditched Google for the most part. Had Microsoft done it, they might have had a shot in replacing Google and maybe becoming the AI Chat provider. But no, Microsoft can't have a well thought UI to provide a delightful UX.
IMHO it's a culture thing. Lack of cohesion is a result of it, I used to be annoyed by Apple that doesn't allow to ship its own UI libraries together with the app so to support old versions etc. but Apple had it right, thanks to the limitations UI is coherent.
There’s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here.
Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don’t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably improved even if they do have a strategy shift to enterprise which includes crapping all over Windows for no good reason.
I’m personally glad FOSS is going strong but that’s a complete aside.
[0] We got burned by Azure as I’m sure many other enterprises have, and they did exactly nothing to remedy/compensate the situation, SLAs be damned. At this point our strategy is to move off of reliance on any Microsoft/windows tech. We moved off of ActiveDirectory not too long ago. Bing/Edge/etc honestly who cares.
Crucially, at enterprise sales, those who make putchase decisions are not the actual users (except maybe for Outlook and Excel). They sometimes play golf together with vendors though. This is how stuff like MS Teams of Oracle Forms gets sold: it checks all the compliance boxes, has support, an SLA, "is industry strength", etc.
The end state of genAI could as well be a few billionaires being their enterprise and everybody else being unemployed or working at the factory. Robots are not there yet (far from it) and someone needs to build and maintain the thing as well as food for everyone. High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.
That's an extreme scenario but today's politicians are not very keen into redistribution of wealth or prevention of excessive accumulation of economic power leading to exceeding the power of the state itself. I see nothing preventing that scenario from happening.
> High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.
‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’
But you already have a machine that can do the dishes. Like doing the laundry, people forget the machines they already have doing 90% of the work. Soon enough artists will forget that computers can do 90% of their work too.
The biggest issue in my opinion is that Microsoft is chasing web devs. XAML is pita, just like css and html markup. They need to pick a lane and just use it. Allow other frameworks access to the default low level api such as Win32, but document it to the same level as Google does on Android and Apple with SwiftUI
I actually like the idea of GUIs being represented in a markup (whether that be XML, QML, GNOMEs new Blueprint (which is kinda a markup language I think?) but I also thought display postscript was elegant so maybe I'm backing the wrong horse
That sounds intriguing - are there examples of desktop apps (eg productivity apps) that are made with JUCE?
I'm already very familiar with JUCE in VST plugins, I have hundreds of VSTs made with JUCE and I love their UIs. But I don't think I've ever seen it for a standalone business application?
The JUCE pricing is certainly far more reasonable than Qt.
I think I prefer that JUCE is a one-off licence at $800 (for small business) and that they offer a 30% discount if you want to upgrade when they release a new major framework version. I'd rather not get locked into Qt's annual $618/subscription every year just to continue distribution & development.
But Qt has the bonus of also running on HaikuOS, and I've definitely seen more business apps in Qt (pretty sure 010 Editor is Qt).
You can configure your JUCE project to build to any of the standard audio plugin formats, or for it to build a standalone app for the target platform (i.e. plugins, desktop, mobile, embedded) or indeed to build all of these targets, at once, in one build.
However, during app (i.e. non-plugin) development I often switch between linux and macos environments as part of my workflow, and during testing after I've pushed to the proper branch, the build server plops out the .exe/.pkg/.app/.tar.gz bundles as needed for the test group to crack at it.
JUCE, being at heart a C++ framework intended to be the engine of a very diverse swath of different OS, plugin, and packaging standards, does all the glue to get you there - how you use it, is up to you. (All of this can happen in github actions, btw, really easy to set up..)
Yes, there are 'business'/'productivity' UI elements in JUCE app targets, and yes they are consistent across all platforms. And yes, you can for example build a UI from an .xml form, with cross-platform datastore and so on, easily enough.
Here's a nice place to start, if you wanna understand JUCE capabilities from a 'productivity'-app perspective:
David Rowland, a core JUCE developer, explaining the guts of things.
Basically, the scope is high performance applications, and there are no really good reasons for why a high performance application cannot also be a productivity app - the distinction is arbitrary - except of course you ask, for the GUI!
But: JUCE' GUI is pretty darn good, I have to say, in face of the onslaught of platform vendor fuckery. You can embed a WebView if you really need it, and wire it up to the rest of the cross-platform event handing system, etc. But I think its not really needed, given the plethora of 'normal' UI controls, out of the box.
If you're serious about looking at JUCE for a variety of application types, then a lot of the questions you're going to have about JUCE' GUI suitability for standalone business applications can be answered by running the DemoRunner application that's built-in to the JUCE codebase.
Clone the repo, build the DemoRunner project for your platform (or all of them), and you'll see - there are plenty of business-like cross-platform UI elements in the kitty. A huge collection of business-/productivity- like UI elements, right out of the box. (High-performance plugin UI's are there with the business UI stuff, too.)
And .. once you've marvelled at the glory of DemoRunner(.exe,.app,.apk)[etc.] .. please do yourself a favour and spend an extra hour parsing the awesome-juce list:
You might have sold me on this, because on top of the productivity-ish stuff I do, I'd really love to get into VST development. If I hadn't fallen into Photoshop plugins first, I would always have been an audio plugin dev. I loved PSP VintageWarmer in the late 90s.
The UI in Rowland's demo at 32min is feeling a little DearImGui / Reaper-ish, kinda bland while also being non-native. But I've seen all the UIs that Arturia & everyone else makes with JUCE, even what Valhalla does with it with their NASA inspired interfaces, so it can clearly make amazing stuff.
I can't believe we're now looking to PACE of all companies to help indie devs. I hated iLok for so long even though I have two iLok dongles now ;)
Java wanted to run your code everywhere so they basically wrote a byte code compiler and then wrote one vm per OS/architecture
I never understood.NET's purpose. What problem it exactly went out to solve? Did Microsoft want developers to be able to run their applications everywhere too? Absolutely not.
Sidenote - MFC is the ugliest thing you'll see. Yet they didn't mention another piece of work called ATL. Active Template Library.
WinForms were really decent and that was enough. Keep Win32 API and a managed wrapper around it as WinForms and that would have been more than enough.
FWIW, x86 has always been a pretty moving target with many instruction set extensions, especially for various SIMD features. But even something fundamental like `popcnt` has a separate CPUID flag, even though Intel considers it part of SSE4.2.
Targeting the broadest possible variant of x86-64 limits you to SSE2, which is really not very capable outside of fairly basic float32 linear algebra. Great for video games, but not much else.
Also keep in mind that .NET originated right at the cusp of x86-64, which again is a whole different architecture from its 32-bit predecessor. Most native apps used to ship separate binaries for years.
And of course, I think Microsoft was aware of their intrinsic dependency on other companies, especially Intel. I can see how the promise of independence was and is enticing. They also weren't interested in another dependency on Sun/Oracle/whoever maintains Java at the moment. While Windows on ARM64 is still in a weird spot, things like .NET are useful in that transition.
Lastly, the CLR is different from the JVM in a number of interesting ways. The desktop experience with the JVM is not great, and Java is a very bad language. It makes sense to do your own thing if you're Microsoft or Apple.
I doubt that .NET was meant to solve the problem of underlying variation in instruction set of Intel processors because that concern does not exists for 98% of the applications anyway they rarely have to look for the compiler settings and for the rest of the 2%, the compiler flags are huge set of options and that kind of tweaks are NOT available for .NET anyway.
Additionally, such applications that want to exploit certain underlying processor's instruction set have no way to do so without detecting CPUID and landing into so called "unmanaged code" because .NET is all about very high level IR that even has object oriented features as well.
The .NET JIT compiler absolutely does query CPUID flags and generates different optimized code depending on available features, as well as the performance profile of each CPU model. This is similar to always passing `-march=native` to GCC.
This can have a huge effect on a wide range of applications, not just those using particular CPU features. For example, each libc implementation typically has a separate implementation `memcpy()` for each set of CPU features.
> What problem it exactly went out to solve? Did Microsoft want developers to be able to run their applications everywhere too? Absolutely not.
So .. initially it was "Microsoft Java", a managed language with tight integration into the Windows APIs, and non-portable. That was .NET Framework. A while ago they realized that even Microsoft didn't want to be tied to one platform, and moved to the cross-platform ".NET Core". It now occupies a similar role to Java but is IMO nicer.
in its beginning .NET was a wrapper around ActiveX and Com-objects and it tried with C# to replace Java (disregarding the Virtual J++ attempt). as their own JVM did not meet the license agreement they made with Sun. so there were several reasons and not every reason being one a developer would care about
Ugh that brings back bad memories. I remember it was supposed to be the answer to MFC. I did an internship where my boss wanted me to use it. It was very painful because it had basically no documentation at all.
The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!)
Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm!. I use Windows every day but I almost exclusively develop cross-platform systems based on the WWW, Java, Python, etc. Whenever I have developed with .NET it has been for a cross-platform front-end like Silverlight or Unity/itch.io.
I can’t say I have a desire to make a native Windows GUI app when I could make a web app: like if it worth doing from my computer isn’t it worth doing it on my iPad from anywhere with Tailscale? For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX and you certainly don’t need to ship an Electron runtime for many applications.
Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app?
I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?)
Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.
Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.
> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.
For me, I see these following advantages:
- Performance; Native & compiled is king.
- Ram usage; Kilobytes vs Mega(giga?)bytes.
- UI control which integrates with the rest of the OS (and updates when the underlying OS tweaks the UI)
From a business standpoint, I get your point that these points don't really matter. Users have shown to not care in the slightest at the bloat in programs.
However for code I write in my spare time, I would much rather write my native Linux program in compiled code than to ship a subpar experience to the few who will interact with it.
> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.
You mean the hypertext platform that has been shoehorned into Java's paradigm, suffering from the same boof-o-rama as Windows, and whose lowest common denominator to support must be Safari for iOS?
Sure it is a hassle to get notifications working, but my take on that for years as a desktop user was "I need another source of spam about as much as I need to get raped". For years I had bottom of the line Android Tracfones and wondered "how is it people get so excited about apps?" because they just didn't work but once I got an iPhone I started to appreciate that the McDonald's app would send me a notification when my food was ready. Recently it was pointed out to me that the application behind these cards
really would benefit from notifications ("your photos are ready!") and I am looking at the hurdles I can jump through and it looks possible but weird. Like why would I want people to install my app on the homescreen where it will get lost on page after page of twisty little app icons that all look alike?
Then there is that PWA boondoggle, there is another app in that system that I can use to register those cards and it is a clear case where I might want to do it outside of cell coverage (say I was in the woods) save a form submission and upload when I get back in range.
What can I say? That service worker system is insane, something like Kubernetes that only Google could subject us to. I mean, Google could have worked out the math for synchronizing a local database to a remote database, by then the Lotus Notes patents were mostly expired, we could have gotten something good. Or Google could have added an API to control the behavior of the browser cache. Instead we got something half baked and barely reliable and then Apple went out and made something a little bit worse. Had it been a good standard to begin with the outcome could have been entirely different.
I used to get hung up on this native vs web thing. But when it comes down to it, it's just one renderer or another unless you're actually drawing the controls yourself pixel by pixel. The sticking point is following the system style / theme. But all the popular desktop OSs seem to have deviated on this so much themselves I'm not sure how important this is.
The inconvenient truth here is also that following the system theme is an anti-feature for most apps. On the desktop, you want your app window to be recognizable at a glance, meaning the primary color should be the brand color, etc.
I currently have open Chrome, Spotify, Discord, Aseprite, and Zed. All of them look completely different, and that's actively helpful for me, the user.
It's nice to follow the system's light/dark setting, and obviously the behavior of basic UI controls should be unsurprising, but beyond that there's no point in "consistency".
This. So often features to use system colors can cause apps to be unreadable or just look like crap. The first time I get a bug report that people can't read something I will lock the colors the down, I just don't have time for that.
Who says the system theme is well designed at all? Back in the 1980s you could count on most text color combinations on a Commodore 64 or an IBM 3279 or a PC with a CGA working.
Today it is absolutely normal to type
ls
on a Linux machine out of the box and if you are running X or Wayland some of the file names are dark blue on a black background and completely un-readable. To be fair, if you are logging into a Linux machine on Windows with ssh on CMD.EXE or most terminal software you get similarly poorly chosen colors. (To be fair, MacOS does do better!)
As a web developer it pisses me off because I am expected to follow
and regularly my management gets legalistic looking documents from customers complaining that we only have 6.5:1 contrast on something and you know what I do... I fix it. I wouldn't send anything to my tester that was unreadable and if I did I'd expect her to put in a ticket and I would... fix it. When MUI computes the coordinates wrong and something draws 20px right of where it should be... I fix it.
Whenever I've put similar tickets to the various parts of the Linux desktop mafia they close it as "won't fix" and often give me a helping of verbal abuse. Even Microsoft occasionally fixes something (even if half a decade late) and their people are polite.
yea there's so many ways through this now. golang and wails is great, rust and tauri is great. both seem to not feel like the slug that is electron because they just use whatever os native web view your os has.
for the dedicated more native stuff dioxus is kinda cool if you don't want a web stack in the mix.
i'm enjoying golang and wails though paired with whatever front end i want, all apps i've made perform execellent on windows. bottom line = yeah i can't really think of a scenario where i personally would ever write an app for windows specifically.
i, like you, used to get hung up on native vs web framework. i'd encourage you to give it a go, possible you cede that mayhaps the native thing isn't as important as you thought.
The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.
> The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features
Can you expand on this, because I'm not seeing it myself. The DOM, html+css is very flexible. It easily encompasses most UI. Most UI is some kind of data display, so lists, trees, tables, forms.
The need for JS might be what you're complaining about. I think we might be stuck with it as a UI control language forever.
The DOM(and CSS) is primarily built for documents and forms, even with the latest addition like Flexbox or Grid layouts. It is closer to typesetting tools like troff, latex, texinfo than any UI engines you can think of. And some that are not needed, like the difference between <i>, <a>, <span>, <strong>,...
Also with most GUI frameworks, there's some difference between widgets like label, button, menu, checkbox,... and containers that does layout management. And there are not a lot of elements in both sets. This is the reason why React Native has a very sparse components library. With simpler implementation, you have a simpler rendering path, and the developer have less elements to deal with.
Also some have ready-made implementation of really useful widgets, like tree, grids, tables, lists, and other dynamic things. You can find libraries for those on the web, but the web implementation of scrollable container is janky.
I am a Firefox-first developer, almost everything I write works in Firefox/Chrome/Safari without a lot of drama.
I have one application at work that loads a table with 40,000 rows into a data grid that works really well on Chrome and lags on Firefox, that's the one case where the performance difference matters.
This year I've been interested in biosignals applications that read data with the Web Bluetooth API and Web Serial API which are ordinarily Chrome-only. I was about to get one of my junk Android tablets out of mothballs when I found there is Bluefy for iOS which supports the Bluetooth API so I have no problem going to labs where they have a really klunky HRV system based on a PC and show them something sleek on my iPad and in 20 minutes i can demonstrate to you, with your own physiology, everything you actually need to know out of a big review paper on HRV.
> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS?
There are other options besides "web app" and "only one OS". A cross platform app which uses something like GTK or QT will be a massively better experience for your users, one a web app cannot hope to equal.
I know one of the GTK developers who dropped out of my research group in the 1990s who's been in charge of triaging tickets and he's the kind of guy who doesn't care if there is just 1.05:1 contrast between text and background and will refuse a one-line patch to make menus render right in rootless X windows because he wants to punish you for doing things in a way he thinks is wrong.
And he probably wonders why it is never "the year of the Linux desktop" but hey it is OK because Red Hat Linux is something enterprises subject their users to and if it had the slightest bit of flair customers would complain.
So when I hear GTK I think Nein Danke!
In general Linux has the kind of fanbois problem that MacOS had maybe 10 years ago. There are so many things that still "just don't work" after years and they never get fixed because you can live without them. For instance I can tell you how to install some package like
sudo apt-get install mypackage
and that's all! I can make 10 pages of screenshots to tell you to click and click and click and click and click to install "mypackage" and you may wind up looking at a spinner for 10 minutes or longer (eventually you give up) and you might wind up corrupting your package database and not being able to install or update anything until you look up how to rebuild it. The Linux desktop is stuck with having done the 20% of the work that gets it 80% done and never does the rest of the work because you can use the command line anyway.
Windows until 24H2 (when Edge and the last remnants of IE were replaced by Chrome) supported HTML apps [1], introduced with Windows 98 Active Desktop. They weren't used much but actually not that bad for end-user needs.
When Windows wants to nag you it makes marketing-oriented screens that I think are visually attractive in a commercial way if not quite as 'cute', 'cool' and 's--y' as a gatcha screen from a mobile game. These sure look like they were drawn with an HTML-based rendering system and if they weren't, they were certainly inspired by commercial art on the web.
When MacOS wants to nag you it pops up a Liquid Glass vandalized version of the 1999 retread of the modal confirm dialog from the 1984 MacOS.
I wish both of them had NEVER OPEN A MODAL DIALOG THAT I DIDN'T ASK FOR EVER AGAIN button that took 80% of the space and a tiny little greyed-out link at the bottom that said "maybe just maybe I want to hear about this in three years" but from a graphic art viewpoint I laugh at MacOS.
One could (and I would) argue that they achieved that despite their web-tech-based UIs, not because of. At least those of us who were around for the days when most apps were still native, do notice and get bothered by the input lag, for instance.
Slack is, in fact, one of the worst offenders. It is so incredibly sluggish. And it doesn't need to be, when I compare it to the speed (and memory consumption) of Pidgin with the Slack plugin.
Async comm in web apps often keeps them responsive when the native app experience is: spinner... spinner... spinner... spinner... lock up the window and you can't move it... spinner... spinner... spinner... "should i reboot the whole machine first thing or should i try killing the app with task manager and starting again?"
The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32.
They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.
At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform.
Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.
MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.
Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.
Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way.
IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).
But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.
That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.
Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.
He had a strategy and it worked very well. But every strategy must be updated. It's basic BCG matrix stuff every MBA graduate knows by heart: sooner or later your star product becomes a cash cow and then a dog. To keep your company growing, you need to identify your next potential stars among question marks, boost them with cash from the cash cows, put competent managers in charge and remove those who get in the way.
Gates did this with Windows, Office, XBox among other things. Ballmer failed to do this this with Windows Phone. Nadella did it with Azure, but he needs to do it once again with AI. You can see that he's pushing hard with Copilots everywhere, what's missing is a manager that has a coherent vision of what AI at MS should look like. ScottGu is in charge of both Azure and AI at MS, but I don't know if he can deliver.
In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.
But I compared it to sp500. Even QQQ only 6x’d in that timeframe.
Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer.
What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge?
Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.
Sure, but how much of that had to do with the design and implementation of Windows? You know, the OS that runs half of the modern economy. Microsoft is just milking it without a coherent vision.
Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. And Microsoft's decisions are undermining their ability to make money in the future, which makes them bad decisions even if the stock price has gone up or if they make more money in the short term.
> Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is.
Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.
WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.
Correct for the Windows 8 and 8.1 initial versions, it was already quite good with UWP on Windows 10.
But then they rioted internally to kill C++/CX (the only time they had something comparable to C++ Builder), Project Reunion got announced and misused from the original goal, porting WinRT back into Win32 killed .NET Native as well, most of the key team members left to Amazon and Google, Azure or AI teams, the team is now mostly interns or juniors from Microsoft India, no direction, and is a mess, naturally.
I went from a WinRT advocate, to pointing out devs to stay away from it, this is how bad they treated those that actually believed WinRT could be it.
Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.
Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.
Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.
My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology.
I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.
Having spent some time kicking around the Delphi space I got quite into WPF in 2007ish. By 2010 I had not just sworn off it, I'd sworn off Windows entirely. The constant stream of rug-pulls as one bit of MS managed to pull off a political heist over another and - oh no - yet another "latest and greatest" technology was effectively deprecated within 18 months of launch, invalidating all the effort you put in to staying up to date just became a pointless treadmill.
Fortunately Rails was taking off at that point so it was fairly easy to change horses and just ignore it.
They did pull that rug, twice, in two different directions.
1) VB7 (VB.NET) entirely split the VB developer community.
2) VB6 IDE has not worked well and is entirely unsupported in every Windows after XP. It's generally recommend to build VB6 apps in an XP VM and XP being out of security support it's now a huge "Use at your own risk" and "Do your best to isolate the VM from ever having an internet connection". (Not to mention that installers like Install Shield that still understand VB6' super messy version of COM are generally also out of support and security support.)
It was alleged that Microsoft almost dropped the runtime components for VB6 in Windows 11. It starts to feel like only a matter of time before they do.
Definitely not, since it actually takes quite a lot of red tape to ship something as ancient as MSVBVM60.DLL in Windows 30 years later, and guarantee that it is still working.
It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.
When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.
That's fine, except no platform answers this.
Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.
Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.
It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.
Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.
I think the mac mostly does this. Developers not caring about the answer is a different thing.
But I gather from your comment that you don't actually care to ask that question, since you have a different need, and already have a solution which works for you. Which I guess is fine if you're happy with the compromise.
But this is about people who actually still care to have "native" applications.
Linux can answer the question, but you're considering Linux as a monolithic platform which it isn't. If you ask "how do you build a UI for Gnome / KDE / Android?" then the answers are pretty clear.
They've got unified themes that make GTK and Qt applications look nice alongside each other. Users who care will be using those. Users who really care might refuse to use your application because it isn't the toolkit they like, but you shouldn't lose sleep over satisfying such particular and demanding users. They're not paying you anyway.
It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off.
I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent on scorching all the ground that wasn't theirs. My team actually did some prototyping for Python/WinRT support, and we had it working to the point of the visual WPF designer in Visual Studio even. Unlike JS, it was full fledged - you could use anything in WinRT same as C#, extend classes etc, while JS limited you to a "consumer" surface of the API. That prototype was killed because Windows (i.e. at the time = Sinofsky) said they didn't think developers cared about anything but JS so they didn't need another high level language.
It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.
And then there was Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!). Aka the Windows-on-ARM that ditched decades of backwards compatibility because Sinofsky decided that rebooting the ecosystem is the only way to compete with iPad or whatever. What actually happened was that the users went WTF because none of their native apps - which, contrary to his take, were very much alive and kicking! - worked there, and devs went WTF because they were told that they'd need to rewrite everything yet again in some new thing that was kinda sorta but not quite like WPF, because Windows just hated .NET that much and couldn't accept that the devs liked it over their stuff. So the app store was a barren waste, and without apps there would be no users.
Some of the technical details in there are plain wrong, too. For instance, .NET 3.0 actually shipped in Vista, contrary to his claim that it was shipped in Win7 (and that it was the first time .NET shipped in consumer Windows - in fact, that would be .NET 1.1 shipping in WinXP SP1).
Sinofsky kept talking about how many devs were making apps in JavaScript and how they would just be at home in Win8. This was before React, ES5 (no native classes! or promises!), etc- jQuery was still very popular and SPAs were extremely rare. He completely overlooked how dependent many of these devs were on their servers- Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.
They thought after V8 the performance was going keep improving and reach native speeds, they didn’t understand that the major performance wins were all upfront and it would hit a wall.
I have always been tempted to use WPF but I’m reluctant to learn a whole new language for side projects. Especially nowadays C# seems to be as huge as C++. Oh well maybe I should grit through the beginning phase.
Often kind of person who makes such mistakes is the kind of person unable to learn from them. The post by Sinofsky is exactly as I imagined it would be.
> It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms.
Yeah, he's talking about WinForms like it was a whole new thing, but it was a very transparent OO layer over Win32 and extremely similar both to VB and Borland Delphi. It was one of the reasons why .NET survived at all when Linux servers became the default option.
The UI part is exactly what I meant. WinForms was a godsend for professional developers making line-of-business apps, because previously if you used first-party dev tooling, you either had to deal with the considerable limitations of Visual Basic, or you had to deal with MFC that was low-level enough that all the things that were tedious about Win32 remained tedious. In comparison, Borland had Delphi, and there was a good reason why it was so popular back in 90s and early 00s, and why Microsoft ultimately acqui-hired its main designer specifically to work on .NET (and it very much shows in the design of both C#, which owes as much to Component Pascal as to Java, and of WinForms, which is so similar to VCL).
With WinForms, we actually got something that was convenient without shackling you. And the whole cross-language story was great, too, especially around .NET 2.0 - with C++/CLI you could very easily wrap any random native code C or C++ library for consumption from .NET, with end-to-end integration in the build system, IDE etc.
It seems Windows division has too much power and they used it to break their things.
Also, Windows division is shipping a subpar product now.
In a sane world developer division and Windows division would think things together, developer division would produce the tools and the same tools would be used by Windows, other Microsoft products such as Office and third party developers.
Why that doesn't happen at Microsoft, I don't understand.
And I don't understand why Nadella doesn't do anything about it.
It's that Nadella doesn't really care about Windows, even though the kernel is the root of Azure. In addition, all the newer gui frameworks abandoned RAD interface. That is what made and still does make Winforms and WPF popular.
> Windows RT had one other anti-consumer and anti-developer feature: it was locked down like a Chromebook, so you could only use Store apps on it.
That was at least in part due to the aforementioned obsession with iPad and generally mobile. One thing that Sinofsky is not wrong about in his post is that the classic Win32 app model is not conductive to good battery life - there's very little there to properly handle things like automatic background suspension or low-power push notifications. WinRT was designed with that in mind, but that would make no difference if the apps would just ignore it, hence the heavy-handed push for WinRT apps only (AFAIR it wasn't restricted to Store, although you had to jump through some "developer mode" hoops to deploy apps directly).
Is there any way to get to the article without going through x.com? xcancel.com just says "Nitter doesn't support this feature yet, but it might in the future."
I remember I was trying to learn GUI programming in late 2000s. I took an attempt at MFC but no matter how hard I tried, it just didn't make any sense. Then I found out about Qt 4 and it felt like magic immediately. I ended up working as a professional Qt software developer for 3 years.
Fast forward to now, and KDE Plasma is state of the art Linux desktop that I've been daily driving for years. It's also built on Qt.
I haven't touched it in years but I remember moving to WPF because it had a better answer for binding UI elements to data. But while WPF does have an answer, everything is so fucking verbose and clunky.
It is a wrapper, but it's not quite on the same level as MFC. MFC really is a thin wrapper, almost 1:1 in most places. WinForms is more like VCL or VB6 in that it uses Win32 where it can but doesn't design around it, so in practice it's more high-level.
At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’
I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader
SDRPlay is using Avalonia for its SDRConnect desktop UI. That's the one native application based on Avalonia I've spent significant time in.
It's ok. I give it pretty high marks. There is a good deal of "lowest common denominator" in it, naturally due to cross platform abstraction. But, it's generally nice, and commercial licenses are affordable.
Qt/Win is enough to get the job done. Not always pretty, but it works. I used to be somewhat ashamed I never learned the actual Win32 API to write native apps, but now it looks like that was time saved. This is a great article.
Winforms is still compelling to me. Now that we have WebView2, building complex hybrid apps is trivial. I know I could easily go pure web, but something about having proper native chrome feels better as a user. All of my clients/users are on windows so I stopped fighting this battle years ago. I've recently been using .NET10 + Winforms + WebView2 to build custom ai assistants for others. I cannot imagine how much it would suck to iterate the presentation of a conversation history in pure win forms. The hybrid stuff is crazy productive.
Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.
Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.
Microsoft's biggest mistake was .Net being a Java competitor when it should have just been like golang producing native binaries. Especially since .Net was realistically only going to succeed on x86/64 at that point (late 90s and 2000s). This shut the door on C# for consumer UIs, and people stuck to Visual Basic and MFC.
It took them more than 2 decades to finally support pure native binaries (via NativeAOT). And it's fantastic for servers on Linux.
The problem was in the early 2000s it was basically accepted x86 was a dead end whose days were numbered.
Itanium was the heir apparent but importantly basically vaporware. How do you develop software NOW and more importantly sell and ship software NOW that'll work on a CPU you don't have access to and for which good compilers don't really exist yet? I remind you in the days where online updates were a luxury at best.
Processor agnostic CIL/JIT code was the prescribed solution at the time. Java had lit the way, and it was the only "clear" path forward for better or worse.
Little did we know Itanium would implode, and x86-64 would rise and give 20+ more years of binary compatibility.
They were recovering from all of the security fiascos of software that wasn’t being updated. So they pushed as much as they could into the core libraries and forced only one version to be installed at a time- so they could easily push security fixes.
This led to one of the trickiest things for early .NET consumer apps- getting the latest runtime installed.
To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "
The roadmaps look messy if you look at them as coming from one company. But if you remember that windows and .net (or DevDiv) are more like competing companies then it makes more sense. Then for one side it’s Win32, MFC, WinSDk and for the other it’s Win32 (WinForms), WPF, MAUI
If Microsoft hadn’t been preoccupied with a failed mobile bet then this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a lost decade followed by a (much more successful) cloud pivot. The reason desktop is ignored is because it can be. No one is eating their lunch on desktop.
As an outsider, it always felt that 'internal team politics' were the root cause of Microsoft's technological downfall. This went far beyond the GUI. In 'flagship' offerings like SharePoint or Skype/Lync/Teams you could see the unmixable partial code-bases brutally forced together under a single product name an foisted upon a user-base baffled by how this could have gone so wrong.
I very much dislike WPF. If I have to do a windows UI (and usually when I do it's a simulator for some piece of hardware), I honestly just grab WinForms. It's stupid simple.
Same here. Also the benefit of a visual Editor in Visual Studio is just Premium. Windows.forms also allow all those „modern“. Takes on ui either with ownerdraw or some grids/hand layouting.
Not just Windows. If you use an Android smart phone (and it might be just as bad on iPhone I just don't know) you see AI features occupying the last scraps of user interface real estate in the form of edge gestures that half the time get me an unwanted AI overlay UI when I was looking for the app switcher. Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave, and the people who authored the original Mac UI guidelines are cringing. Nobody seems to be willing to say that there's no room at the inn, or that somebody's idea has to get evicted before a new idea can occupy space.
I found the article itself very informative and not particularly ai-tastic. But then I got to that infographic at the end. Holy smokes was that disappointing. It seems clear they didn't even bother to read the captions the AI scribbled.
It starts out alright, and then ends with a pile of classic Claude-isms and an unreadable slop graphic. Like the author got bored of writing it halfway through.
I just looked into this a bit because I thought he still had some kind of role at Microsoft even after leaving as CEO/chairman, but it turns out that in 2020 he left any and all positions at Microsoft as it was investigating him over inappropriate sexual relationships he had with Microsoft employees.
Before that he had a role as a technical advisor and sat on the board of directors.
I also found it interesting that Steve Ballmer owns considerably more of Microsoft than Bill Gates (4% for Steve Ballmer while Bill Gates owns less than 1%).
He still visits Microsoft occasionally. A friend showed me a picture of him visiting Microsoft in Beijing a few months ago (he was excited about BillG visiting). So my guess is that he still has an interest in Microsoft products.
I couldn’t know, but generally speaking, older billionaires don’t typically interact with the world in the same way most of us do (well, those without a social media addiction anyway). The device is someone else’s problem.
He’s still around as a part time advisor, he has to officially step back or no one would take Satya seriously, but on important stuff like AI he is a bit more active.
If he doesn't use Windows, you won't hear about it. And if you hear that he uses Windows, it might not be true. He loses nothing by denying it. If it worked for his friendship with Epstein, it will work here.
The root of the problems seems to be trying to find a holy grail design that works across all their businesses. Surface tablet mode, touchscreen laptop, touchscreen desktop (surface studio), mouse and keyboard PC, stylus input, etc.
Then there's a lot of legacy stuff that needs to continue working because otherwise you end up with a non backwards compatible windows.
Then you have to get everyone at microsoft across all their bajillion products to change the UI from Task manager to the 5th level of settings for some obscure ODBC connector.
A decade or so ago, I had a clear idea of what a "native ui" should look and feel like, even if there were multiple routes to get there. I don't know any more.
Both this blog post and the Steven Sinofsky response really set my blood boiling, because they both reek of retired-executive score settling, a kind of blame game that gets played out decades after the fact between ex-high-ranking people in hopes that whoever writes last is able to cement the conventional wisdom.
People who play this corrosive game either refuse to believe that they are at fault for not changing what they were doing at that time or speaking up about what they were observing then, or they know they're at fault and want to deceptively distract us from that fact. Either way, ask yourself this: "Aren't they sorry?" If they're not, just move on.
The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part:
> WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past
I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half and declaring that anything previous to Windows 8, oriented toward desktop, or using primary input through mouse and keyboard over touch was dead. Microsoft basically told all existing Windows developers that if they weren't building a new, touch-oriented, mobile-style app specifically for Windows 8, they didn't matter and wouldn't get any support whatsoever, which is exactly what happened every time they broke existing desktop functionality. Calling this "respecting the past" is a crass insult and taking no responsibility for damaging the Windows development experience and accelerating development away from native Windows apps.
I think for Sinofsky the "respecting the past" refers more to WinRT was/is still just Spicy COM under the hood. Most of the article as I read it is about how .NET was a mistake for Windows UI development and a return to (Spicy) COM its savior.
MS Windows is walking joke for at least a decade, UI consistency isn't it biggest problem. Unfortunately both Linux and MacOS have their own deeply seated issues. This leaves users in an unenviable situation and encourages experimenting, with AI encouraging more and faster attempts. When AI are getting better... I hope this question will become unimportant sooner rather than later.
I blame "Impact". That's what you are graded on at Microsoft. Every performance review ('Connect'), every stock award, every promotion run: did this person have that magical impact.
Ostensibly, grading by impact is fine: they want people who make a positive difference. In reality, it means that creating is better than finishing. Now add in the cold realities that at any given time in Microsoft, some groups are on the up and some on the down. What's a great way for a group to regain some status? Launch something. Jazz it up for the Build or Ignite crowd. Get some dev evangelist to talk about it. Then get on the job board and slide over to another team ASAP. You're a High Impact person. Who wouldn't be happy to have you?
Microsoft itself is a business driven by a consistent strategy of striving for market dominance no matter the means. looking for coherence in the resulting DX is missing the forest for the tree.
I used the more recent Petzold examples to successfully bind DirectWrite to Direct3D, but yeah it’s been a crapshoot otherwise. Still have the Windows Programming (5e?) bible around here somewhere. Took awhile to grind through it. I dread modern-day windows programming it seems like every OS release some new API is going to overtake the others. I moved on.
One could argue the 17 solution summary is actually correct? Why should an os be limited to just one way of doing things. I don’t believe my own words 100% but it is a thought that maybe diversity is the eventual outcome. Ubuntu and MacOS are kinda fighting the same battle. Is that just the way it is?
The web revolution is to Windows UI what vibe coding is to programming today. It brought in a massive group of people who didn't need to understand message pumps, or handles or non-blocking api calls. On top of that, it delivered incrementally more capable result each year. View source taught millions how to build modals, blurred overlay. Meanwhile, the old group of programmers were still worrying about how to protect the knowhow behind compiled languages.
I agree with the thesis of your post, but where we differ is that I think both of those were (are) bad things. Both web apps and vibe coding are causing the market to be flooded with low quality software, not only making the market worse but also giving future generations fewer examples of well-made software to look up to.
It's bad enough that Microsoft doesn't have a satisfying answer to this question, but what makes it worse is that WinUI feels weirdly non-native in ways that sort of uncomfortably result in Electron apps feeling more like real Windows applications.
It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
It's almost like the major desktop platform vendors have all given up on supporting high-quality native desktop applications.
> It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
Apple (and Next before it) have been iterating on Appkit/UIKit for three and a half decades.
Now they have added SwiftUI as a second option and have been iterating on it for a bit over half a decade.
This is in no way similar to Microsoft creating and abandoning another UI framework every couple of years.
If Microsoft had been steadily improving Win32 all these years, where would it be today?
Well, Edge is Chromium. They need to maintain a hard fork, not just a reskin with a bunch of Microsoft webpages and adware. Chromium basically allocates a window and completely draws everything inside using DirectX APIs including menus.
I was recently exploring "an OS from scratch" architecture with ChatGPT. Apart from the central idea that I wanted it to be a capability OS, I also started thinking about how I'd make GUI apps and what layers would naturally make sense.
The cleanest design I came up with works like this:
1. At Layer_1 OS provides panes or windows to which apps can render whatever graphics using OS gpu lib (think Raylib, but maybe a bit simpler). This is good for apps that want performance, games, text editors, things like that - so this is maximum control.
2. Next Layer_2 would be based on the browser engine (which, to some degree, would have to be developer - not a full browser, but just enough to render more or less modern html/css with a DOM-aware JS engine). Then provide some XML schema that would automatically translate into HTML/CSS to render various UI-widgets (defined by XML/HTML elements). This would eventually suggest a JavaScript UI framework on top, but no a requirement. This layer is flexible enough that it uses widgets defined by the system, but allows custom CSS and JavaScript.
3. Layer_3, or more like Layer_2.5 would basically allow custom HTML/CSS without relying on system widgets and XML schema.
Obviously you can mix all three layers into one GUI too. Finally layers (2) and (3) would require some client/server architecture, but instead of shipping it like a webapp, I'd probably provide some JavaScript API to talk to the backend (which in this case is accessible via a socket of some sorts). Apps themselves could still be single binaries that include html/css/js assets which are provided at launch time to the system UI renderer, which then uses them to render the UI via a webview in said pane or window.
I think it's pretty slick and it only gets complicated gradually, but it also requires solid OS plumbing and machinery to make this process smooth. None of the modern systems are capable of it in the way I described it, so people end up shipping nodejs/react apps with webview inside gigabyte-binaries.
I had the displeasure to work with various MS systems over the years and coherence is not a concept in Redmond. It just isn't.
The layers of outdated and conflicting documentation, fragmented logins, the naming (365, live, .net [both naming everything that and the .net core naming labyrinth], copilot), Teams never made sense, Windows had levels and levels of settings (win10 preferences all the way back to dialogs predating the mammoth).
MS was, is and always be a blight upon this earth.
While reading all these comments I keep asking myself if these are the same people who would get angry at another Election app because someone was lazy and didn’t make it native.
The funny thing is that Joel Spolsky predicted most of it 20 years ago[0]:
>> Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled “How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?” and asks, “Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?” A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.
And:
>> Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.
What he didn't see is, however, Azure would become the money printer for Microsoft and made all these no longer matter.
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich.
What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-level windows.
Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.
not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).
It was more despised for being a gaping security hole than anything else, as I recall - the things you could do with it were really neat demos, but even back then, I said "I am not loading a random website that can access local things every time I log in".
That was indeed a pain point, but not anymore after CSS flex layout became available some 10 years ago. It's not worse than WPF for sure. It's even better than WPF because you have access to tons of UI components and toolkits that work everywhere.
I think you're comparing hand-writing an HTML/CSS interface to the WYSIWYG form editor of Qt or Visual Studio? Because hand writing a GUI in Qt/QML/C++/.NET is not any easier than writing it in HTML. There are tons of boilerplate and special markup to learn. The magical editor just hides all the plumbing from you.
I'll grant you that the lack of good WYSIWYG designers for working on web/electron apps is appalling, it's like RAD peaked in 1998 with VB6 and it's been downhill ever since.
There's a competing webapp-wrapper framework that explicitly uses the platform's own browser, but developers don't like being at the mercy of whatever the OS ships...
> WPF shipped in late 2006. It was remarkable – XAML, hardware-accelerated rendering, real data binding. If Microsoft had made it the definitive answer and invested relentlessly, the story might have ended differently.
Er… The author perhaps never used it? WPF was the worst framework I ever used. It was unbearably verbose, brutally unforgiving, used 2-way bindings that created updating nightmares, ans not the least it was incredibly slow.
WinForms was not the best for sure, but at least you can get stuff done. It was for a long time the right answer to the question the author asked. .Net + WinForms worked well.
This is the common thread of all their frameworks since, and in my mind the reason they are stuck in an absolute quagmire. For a while it was possible to use HTML/JS in UWP (I think), but it didn't stick due to everyone already needing to move over their LOB apps with crazy amounts of XAML so that's what the focus was on.
"Hey, let's make something that's vaguely HTML but not really at all."
Big mistake.
Avalonia and Uno are repeating that mistake, even though with Uno, at least, there's a blessed way to do unidirectional data flow/reactive stuff.
This will never change. All large orgs are this way because at the end of the day, unless its preventing them from making profits, there is no incentive to change it.
Moreover, there isn’t much in the way of alternatives. Everyone likes to hate on MS —for decades this has happened and nothing came of it.
At this point I don't get why they don't open source Windows and developer tools, make a foundation to steer the code, accept contributions and borrow ideas from other operating systems.
Starting with Metro every Windows UI framework has been beyond ugly. there's just something so backwards over how nice the UI was in Windows 7, I simply can't understand it.
Metro was created partly to run smooothly on cheap Atom tablets and Windows Phones. Then Microsoft shifted their focus elsewhere and iOS 7/OS X Yosemite happened so they have all the reasons to stay flat.
Updated apps look fine, but the majority aren't. And with that bizarre "Show More Options" nesting in the Windows 11 context menu it almost seemed like Microsoft is no longer capable of upgrading old components in place.
Every year the same debate, every year the same Microslop apologists in the comments, every year nothing ever changes, every year Microslop's market cap keeps groing, every year the same problems
Microslop should have been dismantled decades ago, it's now too late, we need a paradigm shift so that Microsoft no longer affects our society
Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways.
Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design.
KDE has the newer QML-based Kirigami and older Qt Widgets frameworks that are not consistent. Widgets apps absolutely look like actual desktop apps (menus, toolbars, dialogs), Kirigami apps look like mobile apps (nav bars, hamburger menus, page-based navigation). There is definitely a visual and functional inconsistency between the two, even if they use the same theme pretty well.
Anyone else sit through one of those Microsoft "Project Reunion" and wonder "what the hell is even this?" Microsoft has had a completely confusing UI strategy for years.
Here's how I think Microsoft can get a quick and sustained longterm win in GUI (/s but only partially) -
1. Drop all its GUI stacks apart from legacy Win32
2. Port KDE Plasma to Windows (with aliased bindings to support traditional explorer.exe calls so as to not break user apps)
That's it. There really aren't many significant apps that use the rest of Microsoft's stack apart from Win32 that won't recover from this, and Microsoft itself will just see a massive drop in its own costs with a massive rise in user satisfaction.
I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.
Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.
> Dead silence. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we never did answer the question.
Yes they really do a great job at mimicking awful human writing of that horrendous style, whatever it's called. Post-TED NPR style bougie blogging let's say.
Dead silence. Here's what 3 people said (the opposite of silence). Then the meeting went sideways (also the opposite of silence).
The silence is the story.
I disagree. KDE and Gnome both have pretty consistent UI strategies. You may or may not like them but they have clear identities and design guidelines and follow them.
WPF was atrocious from the beginning and Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by not basing everything in Windows on it.
Every WPF program was laggy and took ages to even start up (is everyone forgetting hard disk speeds?), partly due to it being managed code. The components didn't feel native either, and the coupling to managed code and garbage collection basically ensured all those would be perpetual issues. Yeah the programming model was beautiful and all, but you're supposedly developing to make your customers happy, not to make yourself or computer scientists happy.
You can see how terrible it would've been to base Windows's shell on WPF by looking at how much users have loved the non-Win32 windows since then.
I'm planing on switching over to QubesOS - way more secure (especially considering rogue LLM-agents) and visually not much worse from windows ... maybe even more cohesive.
Things like:
- If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can
- Menus should be tree structures
- Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable
As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may well have several different styles all imitated from office, but at least I knew what everything did and when it was slow at least it did what I expected.
This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen. Nowadays that has no chance of working because even to log in I need to press enter or click some button (which one depends on how I logged in previously, maybe) before I can even start typing and doing so eats a random amount of keystrokes while the damn log in screen loads to do its one damn job.
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