I am worried about the future of native UI technologies on Windows. Traditionally at least the developers of operating systems have eaten their own dogfood and have at least tried to implement well-performing & visually consistent native applications to serve as an example to others. Windows 11 has largely done the opposite. Windows has had minimal but perfectly functional native email and calendar apps at least since Windows 10 (could have been in 8, never used that). Windows 11 originally shipped with those apps, but they were removed in a later update and replaced with laggy webview wrappers that take seconds to start.
From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills.
Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place.
That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet.
In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scripting layer that supports Lua by default but gives you the flexability to roll your own language and API. It also is a much lighter dependency than Chromium and V8.
It's missing a couple of features from vanilla HTML and CSS, but also has a bunch of unique featurea that make it far more useful in other ways. For example, it doesn't have CSS background images, but image decorators are so much more useful. And don't get me started on sprite sheets and theme media queries.
I can't help but think that something similarly shaped and designed more for general desktop use would blow the doors off of electron. My workstation has 32 gigs of RAM and yet it's often a half to three quarters full mostly because of Firefox, Discord, and Visual Studio Code instead of more lightweight apps like Visual Studio 2022.....which sounds crazy when you say it out loud.
FWIW, the start menu is a React Native app. I think that’s a pretty good compromise (I think the performance criticism is solvable, they just don’t care). Too bad RN isn’t that well supported on other platforms.
Are you describing XAML?
Possibly? I was a web developer before I started delving into desktop development, so I don't really know a ton about XAML.
I used XAML a bit at an old job
The coolest part was that it was baked into the .NET Framework installed on all newer Windows versions, so I could make a useful GUI app in like 30 KB.
Those were the days... I hated that job though.
Everything I've ever heard about XAML from folks who have used it has been positive.
Seems to me like the kind of thing that was forgotten about due to being joined at the hip with Microsoft, not necessarily because it was a bad idea.
I heard that the WPF code under the hood was jank, which might be part of why MS never went forward with it. From a developer perspective it was quite nice. I started in winform and I miss UI frameworks being obvious and straight forward. I have a rant about how to darken an image using HTML + css that despairs in how unintuitable and bodge-job the solution ends up being. WPF and WinForm were not like that, you draw what someone sees, inline, as they see it and that's quite nice.
I dislike some superficial things about it (and some less superficial things about WPF), but a lot of the ideas around how properties are set are pretty cool to me!
Also how (IIRC) it’s compiled to pretty standard .NET view code (“partial”) you could extend in other parts of the app.
I’m still happy to have left it behind for the aforementioned, ecosystem & tooling reasons.
RMLUI looks neat! closest I've seen to an open source sciter alternative.
so microsoft gave up and the web won?
swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc
Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement every few years that couldn't actually replace the original thing.
It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know "Windows".
Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and less capable than what came before.
I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.
WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.
The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio.
WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn.
I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.
nah WPF made way more sense than WinForm in its abstract design, as it supported flow/stack layout ideas instead of anchors like WinForm did. WinForm was much quicker to get started but had a fundamental flaw in that it couldn't really do transparency.
>and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement
I often feels modern Apple is the same. I mean we are 10 years into Swift, 6 years into Swift UI.
And it feels they are still in beta.
And yet it feels more polished than WinUI, that is how bad it has gotten.
What to expect when new interns have no clue about Windows, have been educated with macOS and ChromeOS, and the design team carries Apple devices?
Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, and still, not as many webviews all over the place.
MSHTML was the first Electron.
Yes, mshtml was insanely powerful. As an undergrad I was surprised how easy it was to build capable UIs with powerful visual effects[1] using mshtml and JS. Even for C++ Windows apps.
It took a long time for this to become a cross-platform reality, but it did inspire me to ignore distractions like XAML and focus on the web.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren’t have any experience with windows, it was something companies used, and today even that has gone away.
I promise you it has not "gone away" which is why Azure is so popular.
What does Azure have to do with windows these days?
Windows is still enforced and mandated on most corporate Fortune 100/500 companies computers.
Their "cloud lift" consists of putting vms into the cloud to run at 10x the cost. (Nothing else changed from The Old Ways)
And that's still where we are today for most enterprises.
That ecosystem has had them for 30+ years and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. If it doesn't have Active Directory and Office 365 or whatever they decided to call it today, they aren't interested.
Still not seeing the connection to Azure.
Wasn't AD like one big security flaw after another?
I think web views do make sense in situations where you’re presenting lots of remote content that may frequently change. After all that’s what the web is, and store content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML anyway, are reasonable candidates.
yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra
but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters!
thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform
SwiftUI apps are not great and they're not fast. A lot of Apple's new apps are considered rather poor. Theo has a video where some devs switched to a webview because the text rendering performed better!
Do Windows developers use Windows or Mac at work?
Naturally they use Windows, Microsoft designers apparently not any longer.
It's impossible to develop Windows without Windows... All dev tools and the repository ecosystem designed to work under Windows.
Well, you can use Avalonia or UNO Platform on Linux or Mac and then deploy to Windows.
UNO Platform is basically WinUI.
Mostly agreed... I'd love to see MS just ditch MAUI and/or otherwise buy out UNO or Avalonia and create a cross-platform XAML based UI library that works everywhere (including Linux). As far as Linux goes, they could just go with Gnome/GTK for underlying support... not sure if QT's license would be compatible at this point, MS mostly uses MIT for modern FLOSS.
Bonus points if it worked with C, C++ and Rust for those that want it in addition to .Net (C#).
I honestly think there's still too many old guard managers/exec at Microsoft to let that legitimately happen though. They're too busy trying to wrangle every last penny of value out of every Windows user along the way.
The issue I see with Windows 11's UI is they seem to focus too much on pushing new apps / features and not enough focus on catching up some of the older tools within Windows. Take for example the Control Panel which is a reskinned version of the same one that shipped with Windows 7. And I'm sure there are tools buried within the OS that probably date back to the 2000/XP days.
Windows 11 looks great if you just look at the press photos and stay a "very happy path" while using it but as soon as you start digging deeper you realize it's like that meme of Homer Simpson with clips on his back.
You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog:
https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8
Yikes!
Though nothing from Apple in 1993 still runs.
Control Panel is definitely a bad example, I do see them working little by little, update by update, to integrate everything into Settings
It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?
It's done when you're not visiting old control panel anymore. I wonder what people are even doing regularly enough in control panel for that to be such a problem.
I don't use them terribly often, but one thing that old control panel windows did was pack a lot of information into a small amount of space.
Device Manager has that nice tree setup allowing me to see problematic devices a lot quicker.
Drive management has that nice table of physical devices on the top and then partitions on the bottom.
The old-school network adapter page shows me every network device in a single window, real or virtual, and I can mess around with their settings a lot faster with right-click properties.
And of course the services manager allows me to make sure that certain services arent running, like Windows search indexing - I use voidtools Everything instead.
That said, those tend to be the exceptions and not the rules. I've actually been quite pleased with the progression of the settings window over the course of Windows 10 and 11. A special shout out to the new fonts page as it is light years better than what came before.
Funny, I recently wanted to uninstall a bunch of fonts I tested for programming. Turns out, in the new font settings widget you cannot uninstall all fonts or even all styles of a font at once. I would have needed to select a font, then click "Uninstall" for the bold style, the semibold style, the medium style, the italic bold style etc.
Opening \Windows\Fonts instead gives you a nice view of all fonts, you Ctrl-select all you want, right click, uninstall, done.
I do agree they didn’t do much in the 8/10 days but definitely feels like there’s a big push since 11
I mean business or corpo world literally force microsoft to support backward compability
in fairness rewrite it from scratch is literally easier than supporting compability since dawn of times but they forced to do it
last time I used Sql Server Management studio the "add database dialog" still had that poorly placed button that its had since its release.
I won't be surprised if there is an effort to rewrite MSO in something like Dart and WASM, and make it independent from any native toolkits altogether. Yes, to reproduce all of the Excel power, and make it available everywhere as a premium plan of O365.
Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny subset of any current UI toolkit would suffice.
Office is a completely separate team divorced from Windows proper. Unless Office deemed it wise to rewrite their UI, they're not going to do so (and it's a frankenstein of a Win32 UI).
Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only libraries to function.
I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office; while not identical in features, they're often good enough outside of BI scenarios or highly complex Excel work.
Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.
Before Project Reunion came to be, Office team was starting to adopt UWP.
See BUILD recordings from 2018, I think, where they demo the new UWP controls contributed by the team, similarly to what happened before with the ribbon on Windows 7.
I would vouch they got as happy as the rest of us.
Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.
Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down, right after they started looking into it.
> Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.
I wish they didn't. Outlook on macOS is abysmal nowadays and I still find myself resorting to the legacy view just to change some settings that both iterations can read but only one exposes.
I significantly prefer using Thunderbird or the web views for Gmail and Zoho Mail over any version of Outlook. Is the integration across O365 apps nice? Sure, but the platforms themselves are miserable to use.
In a similar vein, I was cautiously optimistic about Teams V2 for unifying the client. But then they completely dropped the Linux client for their PWA which does not have feature parity with the "native" platforms and has a significantly worse UX.
I think that Outlook as an experience has become significantly worse as o254 has advanced... I understand some of the reasons, such as managing millions of inboxes vs a few dozen on a private server. That said, it's kind of a mess.
I used Thunderbird for years, mostly to keep my NNTP feeds going, at some point, my mailboxes corrupted between versions (the NNTP site I was using didn't work right anymore) and I just kind of gave up at that point. It was in the dark time, before the more recent resurgence of dev activity, but NNTP didn't seem to be even a tangential focus.
I'd love to see a relatively easy open-source server for mail+contacts+calender that allowed the level of visibility, management and sharing that Outlook+Exchange/o365 offers. Right now, I have some of that, but not nearly the same.
Edit: Also, really sick of getting meeting change notifications in Teams for a meeting that is months away... just leave any meeting notifications beyond today/tomorrow in outlook, I don't need them in my workgroup app.
No, MSO should not be rewritten. It might be adapted to a more universal UI toolkit, if Win32 UI becomes problematic as is. COM is also not going to go anywhere, but I wonder if WASM-compiled components and native code-compiled components could interact via DCOM over the internet.
It makes a lot of sense to wire COM and WASM in some smart way.
If you understood the power struggles within Microsoft and the cut throat office politics, you’d understand. Orgs are fighting orgs trying to over throw one another.
>the power struggles within Microsoft and the cut throat office politics
That's most old large orgs who have been around for ~5 decades. Nothing special about Microsoft.
It’s as if it’s taught in business school or something, how to throw colleagues under the bus. I’ve seen it at every large corporation except for one.
My take on why not ui? though is because they are so busy trying to justify saving their own skins. How could they possibly look outward into the future when they’re busy recreating lord of the flies?
>It’s as if it’s taught in business school or something, how to throw colleagues under the bus.
You're overreaching. Business school doesn't need to teach that, that's just human nature being driven by greed and survival of the fittest, the base blocks of capitalism.
I refuse to believe that. I’ve seen completely normal humans treat each other with respect in the workplace, using data for decision making and accepting the data. It doesn’t have to be King of the Hill.
If I see an org start playing squid games, I’m out. I don’t care how much money I lose or what. I’m out.
> I’ve seen completely normal humans treat each other with respect in the workplace, using data for decision making and accepting the data.
Yes, and once the VC money dries out or the line goes down and the layoffs are on the table, they'll be at each other's throats to make sure the others go on the chopping block and not them.
Human nature is all about survival. People who are elevated beyond human nature are privileged people who don't live in a zero sum environment where every day is a fight for survival or those who are spiritually rich and can just as well adapt to homelessness as a lifestyle.
Let's take for example Nordic countries which are relatively peaceful and low crime due to welfare state, but if for example, all the food in their supermarkets were to suddenly vanish overnight with no way to replenish it quickly, then that peaceful society would flip into a survival of the fittest society where police and army would be the first to use their guns to secure food for themselves and their families.
You see this in the animal studies, where if they only give food to some monkeys, then the other monkey beat the others to steal their food.
The behavior you're seeing in the corporate world is an extension of that, not something needed to be taught. Never bet against human nature and the survival instinct, as all those who did, have been eliminated from the gene pool.
Doesn't windows have like 10 different UI frameworks? Using windows 11 is like going to the natural history museum. Certain apps like MSC still look and feel like windows 2000, then you've got some of the metro influence stuff that is big and bold and blocky colors, and then you have the win11 stuff that is more modern but honestly just looks like lipstick on a pig (right click context menu is a perfect example, it looks modern but has limited functionality and so you do the show more button and yep you guessed it just shows the older style and more functional menu)
What a cluster.
I do not think that has ever been true. Features in Office and other Microsoft products were always more advanced than what was possible in the SDKs. Third party UI toolkits would often fill the gaps until MS decided to allow everyone to use those features, often years later. I guess they did it to make Office feel fresh.