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.
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:
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
Desktop, especially Windows, is such a mess.
It's 2026. We're running 8+ cores and 32gb ram as standard. We can run super realistic video games at high frame-rates.
Yet on the same machine, resizing a window with rectangles in it is laggy on every platform except macOS (where there's a chance it's not laggy).
> WPF was good
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:
https://community.logos.com/discussion/6200
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)
https://youtu.be/FM_iuB3-0aA?si=j7kS68ZVenmPwvAO&t=34
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:
- https://www.edandersen.com/p/evernote-has-no-patience-drops-...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/x0nu7h/comment/im9k...
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]
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
Minor correction: Apple introduced GPU-accelerated GUI in 10.2 with the introduction of Quartz Extreme.
Display PostScript did not have GPU acceleration, as far as I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor?#Quartz_Extr...
Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.
I mean Apple had a GPU-accelerated GUI in 1990, but probably not what we think of "GPU accelerated" these days
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Display_Card_8-...
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.
What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?
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.
Hmm doesn't that sound like Apple's Tahoe/iOS 26? Effects upon effects upon more effects.
iOS 26 runs surprisingly smooth on my iPhone 12 Pro Max though.
2008 edition of “let’s rewrite it in react”.
2008 had its own version of React and it was called Adobe Air
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.
Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee.
What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?
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,....
Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks?
There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing.
It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft, calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it?
I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like QT and Avalonia?
It’s because the first party offerings are not compelling. They’re a disaster dumpster fire. And buggy.
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.
Nope, it is the same issue now being worded around to sell the Apple is shiny story above.
Nobody in this thread is claiming Apple is perfect, just ahead of MS in UI consistency and _less_ buggy
"Ahead" with yes but attitude.
The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"
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.
How is bad UX in the YouTube app Apple's fault? You can mess up Android's back button as well.
Because Apple does not enforce uniformity
If Ah, yes, problems with the UI on the OS which for 99% consists of modals is not the OS vendor problem, noted.
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?
I was referring to IOS, not MACOS
Androids do have universal back button at the bottom on the phone or the same swipe gesture if you want but iphones do not.
Sometimes swipe (the direction and position is a guessing game), sometimes and x (right or left ) and the behavior is inconsistent too (back or close)
There are some guidelines but more often than not seems like every app has it's own method and you need to get used to it
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.
What about going "back" INSIDE an application?
Think for example reddit, you open a thread, how do you go back?
You open the "reply window, now ho you ho back? Maybe close it directly?
I Android this is all handled by the same function and is often ranked as the most frustrating design choice in IOS
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.
There is a common way to go back (swipe from the left edge of the screen). Some apps just don't integrate well and ignore the platform patterns.
I believe swiping from left to right is common for both Android and iOS.
Android has both a swipe gesture or a widget that simulates buttons that used to be at the bottom of the screen
...and iOS has both an arrow at the top left and a swipe gesture. I can't see how they are that different.
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.
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.
I'm in that group.
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.
It's still easier than Windows CE though.
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.
Sure, but you could have had a uniform design language for the last 3 or so frameworks.
Right, but you can make basic adjustments to the theme to fit the rest of the system better, which took them all the way until Windows 11 to realize.
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..
I agree. Except that WinForms has not been abandoned. In fact, it's one of the supported paths in the modern .NET stack.
It lacks hardware acceleration.
Does it need it?
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.
>WinForms is a layer built on top of raw Win32. So it's not portable.
Neither are SwiftUI and AppKity.
> Apple solved this
This comment written before Tahoe
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.
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
I found this out when I tried running an old app I compiled on MacOS several years ago, it still has the old title bar gradient and traffic light.
That's a bad thing. It breaks apps. Apple has decided to stop supporting apps that aren't continually updated. Microsoft hasn't.
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.
Insightful comment
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.
> Apple that doesn't allow to ship its own UI libraries
You can just render on a canvas like flutter and KMP. Most end users don't care
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.
Microsoft was so focused on the enterprise they forgot that enterprises are made up of individual users.
Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.
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 is that the end user is the enterprise
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 French will lead the way.
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.
> 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.
I think the answer is simple - they wanted to Sherlock Java.
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
> Active Template Library
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 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.
> "put a computer in every home and every office"
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.
Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?
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.
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.
In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.
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.
If your only metric is stock price, yes. That’s the value proposition of enshittification.
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.
If the market agreed, the stock wouldn’t go up.
Cloud is now massively larger than any other part of Microsoft. It's why he became the CEO in the first place.
He maybe never had a strategy for Windows but he wasn't hired to have a strategy for Windows.
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.
The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux.
I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?
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.
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.
This was sorted out in Windows 10 with the unification of WinRT programming models under UWP.
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.
[0]: https://pwabuilder.com. Disclaimer: I work on this
> 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?
still works everywhere? the snark doesnt get you firther than that
Works everywhere on modern hardware only.
Majority of software doesn’t need to care about that.
Every time I open a browser on my aging Linux computer (which is running the latest Linux updates), I'm reminded of this...
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".
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.
Because many of those features aren't Web, rather Chrome OS Application Platform, but apparently folks forgot everything about IE history lesson.
What happens when the user doesn't have internet access, or only has very slow internet? What if they're on a metered connection?
>Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app?
Why write an anything-specific app?
Features. Speed. Do your web apps only work in Chrome by the way?
> 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.
A lot of grandeur but zero substance. Aside from performance, what would being written in GTL/Qt bring to VSCode or Obsidian?
What’s an example of a well made GTK or QT app in your opinion? And what would be the steel man Web app to compare that to?
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.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536495...
> For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX
There is no such thing as pleasant UX in a web app. The best experience will always be a native app, a web app is at best a port in a storm solution.
> The best experience will always be a native app
Nonsense. The best experience is the one that solves user’s issue. Technology choice is orthogonal to that.
Figma is far superior to the native apps it replaced. As is VS Code. Slack.
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.
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.
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.
Also, being KDE native means using QT which is a good cross platform toolkit anyways.
Tbh Qt is so big you've still got a few minutes of decision making after you've decided to use it. What parts will you use and how will you use them?
...but then feeling out of place on GNOME / GTK4 / LibAdwaita-land
Linux is a mess, but at least it's unapologetically so.
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.
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.
This 2018 video from TechAltar discusses the same topic: Why Microsoft Can't Design A Consistent Windows (https://youtu.be/hn5QjtpjW_U)
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.
If I'm writing Windows desktop GUIs I still stick to WPF. Might be Stockholm syndrome but I quite like it.
I don't see the reason to use any of the new ms ui frameworks. Especially if ms themselves don't even really use them.
As far as I know visual studio is still a WPF project so I'm not super worried about it no longer working.
WPF looks much nicer. Personally I find it hard as hell to debug.
Winforms just work, and have a well defined set of behaviors. It does not matter that they do not look as nice for most people.
That’s not so bad. I still stick to win32
Microsoft had a lot of great talent suffering from a lack of leadership and coherent vision. They foreshadowed everything wrong with Big Tech today.
what surprised me is how different the rendering architecture is for each framework.
Win32 -> message loops & GDI
Winforms -> managed C# via P/Invoke
WPF -> throwse all away and uses DirectX
UWP -> Appcontainer sandboxing
WinUI -> decouples from OS entirely
This visual breakdown helped me to see it clearly - https://vectree.io/c/evolution-of-windows-gui-frameworks-fro...
At the same time VB still works and runs, so they don't always rug pull.
They might have forgotten to pull that rug.
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.
Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic:
https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542
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).
> 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.
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.
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 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.
How is he dunking on .net?
I think one of his main points is server .net was (and is) great.
But the UI part of it was cloudy.
I see it as complimentary to the post not contradicting it.
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.
> making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE
I remember that. Especially silly.
> Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!)
The gold standard will always be "Xbox one series X", designed to be confused with Xbox one series S.
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.
> 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).
Since that article is a response to this one, we'll add a link to it in the toptext above. Thanks!
Thank you!
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."
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.
It's not going to happen I suspect
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.
A single product name, you say? COPILOT, COPILOT, COPILOT!
The answer is, clearly, Qt.
(This isn't even a joke. Assuming you're not going Electron.)
Part of the reason here is that it's their main business. They can't afford letting it languish and/or changing direction every 6 months.
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.
> From their perspective, gambling on a new managed-code framework had produced the most embarrassing failure in the company’s history
Most embarrassing failure in the company’s history that far.
This barely mentions Windows Forms, which is the cleanest and fastest way to code Windows GUI apps.
A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).
I always felt the problem with WinForms was the name. For many, many years I assumed it could only do forms (ie for data entry).
I went from win32/C++ to Windows Forms and I got a huge increase in productivity and quality.
It wasn’t all roses though, the high dpi support was atrocious.
>This barely mentions Windows Forms
Apparently, you do too, since what you said is basically the same as what the article said (.NET wrapper for C#, fastest prototyping to date)
Winforms is a Win32 API wrapper, so on the same level as MFC, not a separate UI framework.
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.
As of today, I only use 2 solutions for Windows GUI :
- windows forms in .net
- flutter
All the rest always presents itself with a sheer aura of "It was a great idea but we couldn't finish it".
Without ever discussing with anyone from MS about it, I think they stopped improving/working on this because of electron.
Any web developer can build a good enough website and a good enough desktop app with electron.
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
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.
Petzold is a legendary programmer. His book Code is worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_C...
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.
Windows frameworks got web envy.
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.
I would bet in Avalonia UI. It's like WPF but cross-platform. https://avaloniaui.net/
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.
Microsoft GUI development is a mess. They don't seem to care. Just look at the mishmash of different GUI styles in Windows 11.
Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.
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.
This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.
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.
Given how bad windows has become since windows 7, I’ve been wondering. Does Bill Gates still use Windows? Does he put up with the horribleness?
The guy getting std’s from Russian girls who Warren Buffet doesn’t talk to anymore.
That Bill Gates?
Seems he might have other priorities these days?
I think Bill pretty much chilled out since he stepped down?
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%).
Yeah of course. He has nothing to do with Microsoft operations or strategy. But does he still use the products?
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.
He's mostly been hanging with Epstein and asking for people to buy him STD medication due to his endless trysts
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.
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.
This is what happens when one's performance is measured by "impact".
So the windows team hates .NET, so they use react webviews and put them in explorer and start menu???
You have managed to concisely summarize the progress of Windows UI development for the past 15 years, yes.
They use react native
"I looked at the presenter like they had a rat’s tail hanging out of his mouth for the entire hour."
Could have been Ballmer getting a quick snack in before anger-presentation.
Today i still use C# with Windows.Forms. All my old knowledge is still usefull. People know how to use a Windows.Forms program.
It’s great, some vendors have fantastic component libraries for reasonable prices.
Unreal that MS bet the farm in Windows on so many other turds instead of boring old WinForms/Win32.
For some reason I associate this with this article
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
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.
“Retired general criticises the Pentagon” is practically a trope.
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.
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.
The writing style was really poor. Too many words saying too few things.
Entirely AI. I just can't with this style anymore.
That illustration at the end of the article is quite something.
What are you talking about? As a "Chrondum and frade.js" developer, I found it very flelpful.
I for one am on the Mindows Seam, where I can enjoy the books of Charloy Reccold.
Quite some slop
Has it become unreasonable to use an image editor for anything? At least to stamp some readable text on top of your slop??
Sometimes I really don't know whether to laugh or cry.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Worth mentioning a discussion on a similar blog post two weeks ago;
Windows Native App Development Is a Mess
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47475938
Microsoft has a very coherent strategy, described aptly in "fire and motion" by Joel spolsky 24 years ago: keep changing the API/GUI every 2 years:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
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.
L1: Wayland, L2: QML / Slint / XAML etc, L3: Yes, these allow custom widgets
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.
Petzold literally had the Windows logo tattooed on his arm. He was a true believer.
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?
I feel this so hard.
It's all win32 underneath except for UWP, which is now deprecated.
so the answer is win32, raw winproc.
The issue is they haven't made a new GUI API (only frameworks) since win32.
To add the UWP APIs were always less than the win32 ones in the name of security.
The issue was they didn't give you an alternative they just said don't do that.
so inevitably at some point you decide to just write it in win32, don't ship in the store, etc so you can get things done.
The tl;dr is basically to stay with Win32 and ignore all the new and shiny.
That AI image at the end was more amusing than informative. Almost lost it at "Win15" and "Chrondum + frade.js".
I think that is an insult to MS Bob
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.
One of their problems is borrowing ideas from other operating systems. Windows is full of Apple envy whether the addition made sense or not.
Honorable Mention: Lazarus
Case in point after Edge updated this morning:
https://imgur.com/a/dWp5Ohj
Did they even try to make it look like the new context menus?
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.
Why tie your app to Windows at all?
Microsoft developed VS Code and Teams in Electron. That says a lot about how they see the future.
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.
Then the web hit and all that died.
Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.
The problem with things from the Linux world is that they never reached the height of commercial desktops to begin with.
If you really enjoy worse Windows XP UX with hamburger menus in recent versions then by all means go ahead, it does function.
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.
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
Every year Windows loses a little more market share.
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.
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.
funny thing is, with AI, it's become really easy to put win32 apps together, and they load fast and are super responsive!
> 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.
When WPF shipped was when the shit hit the fan.
All that and they abandoned it at birth. It never felt finished and got little to no attention 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.
s/\sGUI\s/\s/g
Couldn’t someone do a similar story about scripting on windows, and make Jeffrey Snover one of the punchlines?
OLE objects are just like disk images.
It’s web. Just use electron or Tauri.
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.
> That silence is the story.
These LLMs are just awful at writing.
I felt fatigued after the second paragraph. All these LLM tropes chained together are horrible to read.
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.
This site needs a no LLM submissions policy too.
I flagged the post, don't even care how accurate it is. Go send your AI slop to /dev/null, folks.
that part really didn’t make sense to me. This is true for all desktop platforms.
I agree, although I was talking about:
WHAT SILENCE?He immediately said they never did make a decision, so probably that indecision.
Having said that, this article feels like AI slop to me. Couldn’t get through it.
Just have a look at the final picture if you're unsure if it's slop
This is a problem with all the OSes.
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.
GTK1, GTK2, GTK3, GTK4, GTK5. Qt1, Qt2, Qt3, Qt4, Qt5.
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 not sure I would blame the problems of WPF on managed code. After all we had snappy WinForms applications before WPF came along.
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.
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 is despised for the same reason web based UI is despised today. Firefox OS was also “too early” and failed.
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".
I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.
This has already happened de-facto. Optimize it properly, and the whole problem disappears.
HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks.
Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.
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.
Uh huh.
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.
Not having to round trip through ACL/security checks.
Not having to deal with state management.
Not having to deal with browser compatibility issues (and mobile vs desktop).
Not having to deal with weird input validation stuff dual layer stuff that is inherent in web apps, but not a big deal elsewhere.
Not having to deal with laggy and unstable connections at the UI layer.
Etc, etc.
That’s the strategy of 20 years ago.
> sufficiently performant
In no universe is HTML performant compared to actual desktop applications. It sucks big time.
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...