Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is!
You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.
But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...
This is wrong. The "recommended" section of the start menu is written with React Native but compiled to native XAML and not running web technologies. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217
> in case anyone needs a reminder of Microsoft's org chart: ...
To be a little glib:
As someone who has worked for a few Big Software Companies, I guarantee that Microsoft's org chart has changed significantly at least once in the last fourteen years.
Re-organizations aren't referred to as "shuffling the deck chairs [on the Titanic]" by the rank and file for no reason, yanno?
My impression from the outside is that the biggest change is that there are now a lot more and smaller circles pointing guns at each other
But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better. After all since some Windows 10 update the Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot (which from a kernel, fs and cmd perspective was always valid)
> But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better.
Based on my experience with Blasted Corporate Hellscapes, I find it very unlikely that they cooperate better. Middle-ish management lives to stab each other in the back, belly, and face.
> ...Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot...
That's progress! Does Windows Explorer still shit the bed when you ask it to interact with a file whose name contains the '|' character? That's always been valid in NTFS, and I think is valid in at least a subset of the Windows programming interfaces.
Kind of related, but a lot of designers only understand a react point of view these days. Which is why you will see react, specifically, turn up in the most random fucking places.
Every place I've worked which did not use react had steady pushback from UI/UX to move to react. It took active resistance to not use react, even though it didn't make any sense to use.
I don't think that the activation of this process is tied to the enabled-state of any features and the recommended section/start menu in general does not even use a Webview. It may be active all the time because various parts of the OS use it (I think the settings app for MS account stuff and the Explorer for some Office 365 features?) and it's faster keeping it active instead of starting it constantly.
Dear God, I hate the way the Windows 11 Start Menu takes slightly too long to open - long enough that I often accidentally close it again. You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.
> You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.
Not any more, I kept windows 11 around for gaming but I binned the partition, how they managed to make a 7950X3D/7900XTX feel "clunky" is astounding given that I live in KDE which has a reputation for been a "heavy" DE and yet it it feels instantaneously fast in every dimension compared to windows 11.
The native client had features the web one didn't have, like video calls, so it was actually the one leading features-wise.
I guess it's because they decided to make the web client first-class, and instead of maintaining a native client for each platform (windows, mac, linux...) they opted to just serialize all non-mobile uses (which probably aren't that important to them to begin with) to web.
I keep fighting with devs that want to use web-everything.
Luckily for me, i have the ultimate power so i can just say "Firefox doesn't support that. I don't use chrome. period."
But lately i had to start saying Safari doesn't support that so we would lose all iphones, or we can start investigate after we have a working solution. God damn react.
Out of curiosity, what are you proposing instead? I'm currently working in a small company (less than 4 full time employees). And while we can never support native apps for all the platforms I have been wondering what we would use instead of a web app?
The advantage of the web app is that it just works, without installation, so there's no friction there. I'd very much prefer a native app, but the overhead is quite high, no?
Depends on the app and how it's built. There are ways to architect native mobile apps that give a lot of flexibility, and there are even ways to build both the native and web apps that help with information architecture and UX consistency but you have to design them with that in mind.
Your reasoning seems counter intuitive as back in 2012 Facebook rewrote their HTML5 based app to native iOS code, optimized for performance, and knowingly took the feature parity hit.
Reminds me of this 2013 story where they moved to native Java for Android and hit limits with e.g. too many methods and instead of refactoring or just not bloating their app they hacked some internals of the Davlik VM while it's running during app install: https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood...
For some application certainly. Instant messaging of course has many strong point in term of what is to be dealt with. Short messages, photos, quick visios.
But to edit large document, visualize any large corpus with side by side comparison, unless we plug our mobile on a large screen, a keyboard and some arrow pointer handler, there is no real sane equivalent to work with on mobile.
Yeah, but the majority of people who would've been daily desktop or at least laptop users some 10 to 15 years ago now make do with a phone. Most people do not need to visualize any large corpus or edit large documents. Similarly, there's a great deal of phone users who's first interaction with computers was via a smartphone.
I just don't get it. Well ok, I kinda get it. I get the feeling nobody wants to build native apps anymore, or they don't or can't advocate for it strongly enough, or those advocates aren't in a position where they can make decisions.
And from a manager's point of view it seems wasteful to develop the same feature across multiple platforms. And if you look at the numbers it does, but numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now. They don't consider performance or memory usage a factor, and perceived performance is "good enough" for a web app.
> numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now
Ever since UX and UIs started to be driven mainly by metrics and numbers, I felt something started going wrong already. Since then (the decades...), I've learned about "McNamara fallacy" which seems to perfectly fit a lot of "modern" software engineering and product management today:
> The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy) [...] involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
I occasionally use whatsapp or discord webapps, but won't install the apps. I don't know for sure which sandboxes the processes more effectively, but I kinda assume the browser is my better bet for protecting myself from crap.
Happy to learn otherwise, but might be a datapoint on user behaviour (which could also drive corporate choices).
When you use a desktop computer with 32GB RAM and everything you do work-related runs on a giant world-wide datacenter, numbers start to look small.
When a developer/company decides to not implement things local and proper way and push it out and be done with it regardless of the resources the product use on the users' system, I mark the company as lazy and cheap, actually.
Shoving the complexity and cost to users' is being inconsiderate.
I've been wondering whether it's time to reserve browsers for their original purpose of reading documents and move web applications to a different paradigm: perhaps native controls/windows rendered and controlled by cross-platform markup served over the web, running on a "headless" sandbox. Perhaps a bit like React Native, but JIT compiled on the client. Not sure if this already exists. I'd really like to have native UI controls back for applications.
If they hadn’t fumbled the UI framework, and to a lesser extent the language design, you’re effectively describing .Net’s original role in the MS ecosystem and their play for web dominance.
JIT compiling, native graphics, quick and easy online deployment into sandboxes, support for desktop standards like keypresses, etc.
It feels like the web ate up the windows desktop experience instead of that experience spreading cross-platform and dominating.
Ah no I was just being snarky and not at you. We're all missing (hyper)text markup language as the UI markup layer, plus js. We previously had some kind of alternative "load app from internet" but the runtimes were external (and provided lots of fun security holes).
I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.
Java applets drove native widgets in their first iteration. It wasn't markup but that hardly matters, you could have easily slapped some XML over AWT and the difference between a .jar and a .js isn't big.
They had to stop because native widgets aren't secure enough.
As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web.
So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste.
I think we’re not far away from shipping native compiled to Wasm running on Electron in a Docker container inside a full blown VM with the virtualization software bundled in, all compiled once more to Wasm and running in the browser of your washing machine just to display the time. And honestly when things are cheap, who cares.
Do you think most people have 128GB laptop? It’s more likely to be 8 or 16 GB. The OS os likely taking 4 or more, the browser two or more. And if you add any office applications, that’s another few GB gone. Then how many Electron monstrosities you think the user can add on top of that?
Some PM: users are locked in to our ecosystem; they can't load other apps after ours! /s
But for real, the average number of apps people downloading get fewer year over year. When the most popular/essential apps take up more RAM, this effect will only exacerbate. RAM prices have also doubled over the last 3 months and I expect this to hold true for a couple more years.
It depends what metrics are considered. We can’t continue to transform earth into a wasteland eternally just because in the narrow window it takes as reference a system disconnect reward from long terms effects.
You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.
But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...