I love Windows 11. I'm sure some of my code still lives in Windows 11 from my days at Microsoft. But, the hasty and haphazard ways that some teams at Microsoft treat it sadden me.
I specifically despise Microsoft Accounts being forced down our throats because, among all other things, they make certain workflows impossible. For instance, you can't schedule tasks to run as your user when you're not logged in[1]. It won't work because your Microsoft account doesn't have a password in the traditional sense. You basically can't do anything that requires you to enter your Windows user credentials. I also had problems with making Remote Desktop connections to my other computers at home in the past and maybe it's related to this too.
Another thing; I don't like seeing multiple WebView-based apps running on my system all the time either. WebView or Electron screams lazy to me. Because some dev team didn't want to bother to write a decent and lightweight GUI frontend with numerous GUI frameworks Microsoft had released, 1.5 billion Windows users have to pay the price to have an extremely heavyweight layers of layers of abstractions on their system running all the time. I can't imagine the waste at this scale. Something basic like "Start menu search" should never be a WebView, but it is[2].
How many browser tabs you have open right now?
I find JavaScript and its ecosystem atrocious in many ways, but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.
I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either. In both cases, GPU takes care of the graphics rendering, JIT and GC do what they do, and you might be able to offload the pain points over to C++ through WebAssembly and P/Invoke or COM objects.
> but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.
"My car runs fine with the five anvils in the trunk" isn't the argument you're looking for.
Performance isn't the only problem with Electron either. Electron apps fail to integrate with native system components both from look and feel and accessibility aspects like incorrect zoom levels on HiDPI displays etc. They are even worse than browser tabs in that manner.
> I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either
RAM usage would be at least an order of magnitude different. Nothing to do with how well-written it is either. It's inevitable.
Well, we're in the anvil business. Unless someone pulls the cart himself using C++ and MFC, similar amounts of oat will be consumed to get to our destination. Based on my empirical observations, WinUI 3 with C# eats memory like a horse. I'm willing to stand corrected with more data.
Platform integrity and accessibility are the real concerns with Electron. What is the solution, though? Does anyone still have time and patience for the byproducts of WinDev vs DevDiv power plays, even at Microsoft?
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