5 ms·

Meanwhile, they forced AI Copilot bloat into Notepad, whose singular use-case was supposed to be that it does one thing well without unnecessary features.

saturn5k 1y ago
I stopped using Notepad since they introduced tabs.
dwattttt 1y ago
I recall reading Raymond Chen mentioning that Notepad actually gets more exercise than you'd expect; it's a common guinea pig for features: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
pjmlp 1y ago
Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft <3 FOSS, the Gates/Balmer era was much better towards Windows developers. Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.
- CineSnaccs 1y ago
  I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year. As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
  - wronex 1y ago
    I would highly recommend looking into Azure code signing. It is confusing to set up. But comes with instant reputation and ”only” costs 10$ a month. EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.
  - simplyinfinity 1y ago
    Good. This might suck for opensource devs, but for normies that might get a random exe link this is good. I've gotten numerous phone calls from relatives when they try to run some unrecognized app, most of the time is benign, but on few occasions it was something malicious.
    - conductr 1y ago
      It's a heavy tax to protect the ignorant. I hear things like this and think how I've been using a computer for nearly 4 decades and it's never once happened to me. Maybe those types of people need to re-evaluate their technology choices (maybe iPad is more appropriate) instead of taxing the entire ecosystem to protect them from themselves.
      - simplyinfinity 1y ago
        low income countries don't have the money for iPads. My parents run on a 300 Euro computer bought 5 years ago. My dad is technical enough to get around a computer, but he's in his 60s now. My mom can open Facebook and youtube. Sometimes either of them downloads stuff, and opens them. So your solution is "make millions consumers spend $$ on overpriced hardware and even more closed off system, so few hundred open source devs don't spend 500$ to verify their app (which they will have to do if they want to release on the iOS platform either way)" Ain't no way.
      - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
        A popup warning is not a heavy tax.
      - cwyers 1y ago
        If you count the number of ignorant people who use Windows versus the people like you, you'll quickly realize the tax is very cheap for the level of protection it offers to the number of people it offers it to.
        ethbr1 1y ago
        The correct answer should be a legally-mandated one-time escape hatch. Bury it as deep as Microsoft wants, but... 1) Everyone can use it 2) It turns off all nanny-checks 3) It makes future checks opt-in instead of opt-out
  - rollcat 1y ago
    Unfortunately Apple normalised it, first with the iPhone. There are upsides (theoretically - less trash apps), but the review/curation process doesn't scale, and yep - the small devs are effectively told to bug off. 10 years ago I wanted to build a Love2D game, and release it for the three major OS's. The .love files are effectively ZIP archives, kinda like cartridges, but you need the correct Love2D version (they broke API compat every year or so). Windows and Mac used to be: "cat love.exe game.zip > game.exe". Linux gave me the most crap, because making a portable, semi-static build was a nightmare; you couldn't rely on distros because each one shipped a different version of love. Now Linux is actually becoming more viable, not because it's making that much progress, but because the two mainstream platforms are taking steps back.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      No they didn't, signing was already common across Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Newton, PalmOS, Blackberry, BREW. And game consoles naturally.
      - rollcat 1y ago
        All of these platforms combined had less global impact over their lifetime than iPhone has had in its first five years. Apple is never first to do something.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        Only from an American point of view, catching up to the mobile life in Europe, Asia, and some lucky African countries. I started coding for J2ME on a Vodafone contest, based on Sharp GX20, which was using DOCOMO APIs in 2003. Afterwards I joined Nokia, so I kind of had an idea how we, and our competition was doing in the market. US was the only market that stayed PDA centric, with exception of Blackberry adoption, until the iPhone came to be. Traditionally it was the only market where Nokia had issues.
    - prepend 1y ago
      At least signing is free for MacOS apps. And back when I used it only $100/year for iPhone apps.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    Now I get why a project I work on is signed for Apple and not for Windows... 5x the price, jeez
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  There are currently no ideal native app development frameworks on Windows. WinForms is the closest thing
  - Timwi 1y ago
    I'm so glad to hear that from someone unprompted. I tried WPF and it was a million times harder to use than WinForms, and I couldn't even be bothered to try out MAUI (although I accept it as an apology for WPF lol). I'm still using a WinForms application every day (Git Extensions) and have been able to contribute to it not least because it's the good old familiar WinForms. This is not to say that WinForms isn't without its problems. I often wonder what it could be like if all the effort of making WPF and MAUI had gone into maintaining, modernizing and improving it.
    - shortrounddev2 1y ago
      I think that the native GUI development APIs provided by OS vendors need a kind of "headless" implementation first, where you can build UI in pure code like winforms, and then they should offer a framework on top of that. I, personally, hate XAML. It's stricter than HTML/CSS and very opinionated about how to organize your application. I feel that XAML frameworks should have a common Winforms-like API behind them that you can switch to any time you want. But I've found that using the C# code-behind APIs manually for WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc, is far more verbose than Winforms was. My only major problem with winforms is that it's still using GDI under the hood which, despite what many people believe, is actually still primarily software-rendered. If they could just swap out Winforms for Direct2D under the hood (or at least allow a client hint at startup to say "prefer Direct2D") it would really bring new life to Winforms, I think. I would also like a C++ native GUI API that's more modern than MFC
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of. MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey. There there is Qt as well. Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony. With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX. Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings. So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks. [0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.
- naikrovek 1y ago
  The new Edit.exe is indeed safe from those things. A requirement for the tool is that it must remain as small as possible, so that it can be included in the smallest distributions of Windows, like Nano Server. It is the rescue text editor there. I’m sure plugins are going to do all the things that everyone doesn’t want (or does want) but the default edit.exe will remain small, I’d bet money on it.
GardenLetter27 1y ago
It sucks so much - my ISP had an intermittent outage (some IPv4 / MTU issues), and I couldn't save files in Notepad without disabling it. I was literally trying to configure Wireguard to get around the ISP issues.
masfoobar 1y ago
Thank you for this! I had to open Notepad and see it for myself. Wow! I see the Icon. I remember Co-pilot just suddenly appearing in my taskbar and finding it annoying. Despite removing it, I still see it lurking around... and now I see it is a SIMPLE TEXT EDITING PROGRAM named Notepad. Wow.
OptionOfT 1y ago
And if you uninstall the modern notepad, start's search doesn't find the old one.
- MaxikCZ 1y ago
  As if start's search ever found anything...
bgro 1y ago
Every product has bizarre bloat. I understand things might get heavier over time with new features, but Office from like 20 years ago still works pretty great. In fact, I don’t even really see any new features that are missing in my normal use case. Actually, anything that DOES exist in a newer version is something I actively DO NOT want. For example, monthly/yearly subscriptions, popups that interrupt typing to advertise some new bloat, and dedicated buttons to import any file into a powerpoint presentation or email. Look at Outlook. Literally less than 25% of the screen appears to be dedicated to email content. I say literally because I physically measured it and from what I remember it was 18% to 20%. Microsoft keeps adding these gigantic toolbars that each have duplicate buttons that often can’t really be adjusted, removed, or hidden. Or it may be an all-or-nothing scenario where something can be removed but then you can’t e.g. send emails. Rather than fixing the problem, the solution is to add a new toolbar. This frequently keeps happening. Just one more toolbar with a select subset of buttons in one place so people can find it. Well now… We have some extra whitespace… Let’s throw in the weather there and why not put the news in too. What could possibly go wrong? And then loading the news, some totally unrelated and non-critical feature they shove in forcefully by default frequently has at least one critical severe bug where there’s an async fetch process that spikes the cpu to max and crashes the whole system. There’s no way to disable news without first loading outlook and going into advanced settings, which of course is past the critical point of the news being loaded. Go look at like Outlook 2003. It is nearly perfect. It’s clean, simple, and there’s no distractions. This is so amazing, like many Microsoft products that seem to be built by engineers, but I don’t know how we get to modern outlook that feels like it has 10 to 50 separate project manager teams bloating it up often with duplicate functionality. This would be bad enough, but then again instead of fixing it like I said before or fixing it by reducing or consolidating teams or product work, we get ANOTHER layer of Microsoft bloat by having multiple versions of the same product. So we have Outlook (legacy) named that way to make you feel bad for using an old version, or named to scare you into believing it won’t be supported. Then there’s Outlook (New). Then there’s Outlook (Classic) which isn’t legacy or new but is a weird mix of things. Then there’s a web version that they try to force everybody into because it’s literally perfect and there’s no reason not to use it… Somehow they didn’t catch that emails don’t load in folders unless you click into them, or sorting rules don’t work the same or don’t support all the same conditions. Rather than fixing it, you get attacked for using edge case frivilous advanced obscure functionality. Like who would want to have emails pre-sorted into any folder except inbox? Shame on you for using email wrong I guess. I’ll skip over the part where there’s multiple versions of the multiple forks of outlook. But there’s also Government, Education, Student, Trial, Free, Standard, Pro, Business, Business pro, Business premium, etc. The last infuriating point in my rant has to come down to their naming standards. For some reason they keep renaming something old to a completely new name and of all the names they could pick, it’s not only something that already exists but it’s another Microsoft product. This is a nightmare trying to explain to somebody who is only familiar or aware of either the old or the new name and this confusion is often mixed even on a technically capable and competent team. For bonus points, the name has to be something generic. Even like “Windows” which is not a great example because the operating system is so popular but you can imagine similarly named things causing search confusion. Or even imagine trying to search for the GUI box thing that displays files in a folder within the operating system, also called a window, and try to imagine debugging an obscure technical problem about that while getting relevant information. There’s so many Microsoft moments that things like adding AI to notepad hardly phase me anymore. I don’t like that they do that but I wouldn’t necessarily be so offended if their own description they came up with in the first place was what you mentioned. Constantly going against their own information they invented themselves and chose to state as a core statement just irritates me.
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
I took a screenshot and pasted it into the new Win11 Paint. Even minimized, Paint was constantly using 5% CPU and sitting at ~250MB of RAM. I guess I can begrudgingly get over the RAM, but squandering the CPU like that is ridiculous. What happened to pride or quality control or anything?
- hulitu 1y ago
  > What happened to pride or quality control or anything? We are talking about Microsoft here.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Exactly. Their software has always been shit. Microsoft didn’t become dominant because of the quality of their software. They became dominant because they knew how to run a an aggressively successful business better than their competitors.
- dogleash 1y ago
  >What happened to pride or quality control or anything? Sounds like some dangerous cowboy coding wrongthink you've got going on over there.
- jandrese 1y ago
  I assume it is basically an Electron app now. Anything will be bloated when it's a full web browser running some webapp.
  - contextfree 1y ago
    No, it doesn't use Electron or webviews afaik. The UI is mostly WinUI2/UWP/XAML Islands based however
    - jandrese 1y ago
      If that's the case then why is it so heavy? In comparison The Gimp consumes about 80MB of memory and burns a trivial amount of when not being actively used.

saturn5k 1y ago

I stopped using Notepad since they introduced tabs.

dwattttt 1y ago

I recall reading Raymond Chen mentioning that Notepad actually gets more exercise than you'd expect; it's a common guinea pig for features: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...

pjmlp 1y ago

Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft <3 FOSS, the Gates/Balmer era was much better towards Windows developers. Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.

CineSnaccs 1y ago
I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year. As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
- wronex 1y ago
  I would highly recommend looking into Azure code signing. It is confusing to set up. But comes with instant reputation and ”only” costs 10$ a month. EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.
- simplyinfinity 1y ago
  Good. This might suck for opensource devs, but for normies that might get a random exe link this is good. I've gotten numerous phone calls from relatives when they try to run some unrecognized app, most of the time is benign, but on few occasions it was something malicious.
  - conductr 1y ago
    It's a heavy tax to protect the ignorant. I hear things like this and think how I've been using a computer for nearly 4 decades and it's never once happened to me. Maybe those types of people need to re-evaluate their technology choices (maybe iPad is more appropriate) instead of taxing the entire ecosystem to protect them from themselves.
    - simplyinfinity 1y ago
      low income countries don't have the money for iPads. My parents run on a 300 Euro computer bought 5 years ago. My dad is technical enough to get around a computer, but he's in his 60s now. My mom can open Facebook and youtube. Sometimes either of them downloads stuff, and opens them. So your solution is "make millions consumers spend $$ on overpriced hardware and even more closed off system, so few hundred open source devs don't spend 500$ to verify their app (which they will have to do if they want to release on the iOS platform either way)" Ain't no way.
    - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
      A popup warning is not a heavy tax.
    - cwyers 1y ago
      If you count the number of ignorant people who use Windows versus the people like you, you'll quickly realize the tax is very cheap for the level of protection it offers to the number of people it offers it to.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        The correct answer should be a legally-mandated one-time escape hatch. Bury it as deep as Microsoft wants, but... 1) Everyone can use it 2) It turns off all nanny-checks 3) It makes future checks opt-in instead of opt-out
- rollcat 1y ago
  Unfortunately Apple normalised it, first with the iPhone. There are upsides (theoretically - less trash apps), but the review/curation process doesn't scale, and yep - the small devs are effectively told to bug off. 10 years ago I wanted to build a Love2D game, and release it for the three major OS's. The .love files are effectively ZIP archives, kinda like cartridges, but you need the correct Love2D version (they broke API compat every year or so). Windows and Mac used to be: "cat love.exe game.zip > game.exe". Linux gave me the most crap, because making a portable, semi-static build was a nightmare; you couldn't rely on distros because each one shipped a different version of love. Now Linux is actually becoming more viable, not because it's making that much progress, but because the two mainstream platforms are taking steps back.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    No they didn't, signing was already common across Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Newton, PalmOS, Blackberry, BREW. And game consoles naturally.
    - rollcat 1y ago
      All of these platforms combined had less global impact over their lifetime than iPhone has had in its first five years. Apple is never first to do something.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Only from an American point of view, catching up to the mobile life in Europe, Asia, and some lucky African countries. I started coding for J2ME on a Vodafone contest, based on Sharp GX20, which was using DOCOMO APIs in 2003. Afterwards I joined Nokia, so I kind of had an idea how we, and our competition was doing in the market. US was the only market that stayed PDA centric, with exception of Blackberry adoption, until the iPhone came to be. Traditionally it was the only market where Nokia had issues.
  - prepend 1y ago
    At least signing is free for MacOS apps. And back when I used it only $100/year for iPhone apps.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  Now I get why a project I work on is signed for Apple and not for Windows... 5x the price, jeez
shortrounddev2 1y ago
There are currently no ideal native app development frameworks on Windows. WinForms is the closest thing
- Timwi 1y ago
  I'm so glad to hear that from someone unprompted. I tried WPF and it was a million times harder to use than WinForms, and I couldn't even be bothered to try out MAUI (although I accept it as an apology for WPF lol). I'm still using a WinForms application every day (Git Extensions) and have been able to contribute to it not least because it's the good old familiar WinForms. This is not to say that WinForms isn't without its problems. I often wonder what it could be like if all the effort of making WPF and MAUI had gone into maintaining, modernizing and improving it.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    I think that the native GUI development APIs provided by OS vendors need a kind of "headless" implementation first, where you can build UI in pure code like winforms, and then they should offer a framework on top of that. I, personally, hate XAML. It's stricter than HTML/CSS and very opinionated about how to organize your application. I feel that XAML frameworks should have a common Winforms-like API behind them that you can switch to any time you want. But I've found that using the C# code-behind APIs manually for WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc, is far more verbose than Winforms was. My only major problem with winforms is that it's still using GDI under the hood which, despite what many people believe, is actually still primarily software-rendered. If they could just swap out Winforms for Direct2D under the hood (or at least allow a client hint at startup to say "prefer Direct2D") it would really bring new life to Winforms, I think. I would also like a C++ native GUI API that's more modern than MFC
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of. MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey. There there is Qt as well. Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony. With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX. Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings. So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks. [0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.
naikrovek 1y ago
The new Edit.exe is indeed safe from those things. A requirement for the tool is that it must remain as small as possible, so that it can be included in the smallest distributions of Windows, like Nano Server. It is the rescue text editor there. I’m sure plugins are going to do all the things that everyone doesn’t want (or does want) but the default edit.exe will remain small, I’d bet money on it.

GardenLetter27 1y ago

It sucks so much - my ISP had an intermittent outage (some IPv4 / MTU issues), and I couldn't save files in Notepad without disabling it. I was literally trying to configure Wireguard to get around the ISP issues.

masfoobar 1y ago

Thank you for this! I had to open Notepad and see it for myself. Wow! I see the Icon. I remember Co-pilot just suddenly appearing in my taskbar and finding it annoying. Despite removing it, I still see it lurking around... and now I see it is a SIMPLE TEXT EDITING PROGRAM named Notepad. Wow.

OptionOfT 1y ago

And if you uninstall the modern notepad, start's search doesn't find the old one.

MaxikCZ 1y ago
As if start's search ever found anything...

bgro 1y ago

Every product has bizarre bloat. I understand things might get heavier over time with new features, but Office from like 20 years ago still works pretty great. In fact, I don’t even really see any new features that are missing in my normal use case. Actually, anything that DOES exist in a newer version is something I actively DO NOT want. For example, monthly/yearly subscriptions, popups that interrupt typing to advertise some new bloat, and dedicated buttons to import any file into a powerpoint presentation or email. Look at Outlook. Literally less than 25% of the screen appears to be dedicated to email content. I say literally because I physically measured it and from what I remember it was 18% to 20%. Microsoft keeps adding these gigantic toolbars that each have duplicate buttons that often can’t really be adjusted, removed, or hidden. Or it may be an all-or-nothing scenario where something can be removed but then you can’t e.g. send emails. Rather than fixing the problem, the solution is to add a new toolbar. This frequently keeps happening. Just one more toolbar with a select subset of buttons in one place so people can find it. Well now… We have some extra whitespace… Let’s throw in the weather there and why not put the news in too. What could possibly go wrong? And then loading the news, some totally unrelated and non-critical feature they shove in forcefully by default frequently has at least one critical severe bug where there’s an async fetch process that spikes the cpu to max and crashes the whole system. There’s no way to disable news without first loading outlook and going into advanced settings, which of course is past the critical point of the news being loaded. Go look at like Outlook 2003. It is nearly perfect. It’s clean, simple, and there’s no distractions. This is so amazing, like many Microsoft products that seem to be built by engineers, but I don’t know how we get to modern outlook that feels like it has 10 to 50 separate project manager teams bloating it up often with duplicate functionality. This would be bad enough, but then again instead of fixing it like I said before or fixing it by reducing or consolidating teams or product work, we get ANOTHER layer of Microsoft bloat by having multiple versions of the same product. So we have Outlook (legacy) named that way to make you feel bad for using an old version, or named to scare you into believing it won’t be supported. Then there’s Outlook (New). Then there’s Outlook (Classic) which isn’t legacy or new but is a weird mix of things. Then there’s a web version that they try to force everybody into because it’s literally perfect and there’s no reason not to use it… Somehow they didn’t catch that emails don’t load in folders unless you click into them, or sorting rules don’t work the same or don’t support all the same conditions. Rather than fixing it, you get attacked for using edge case frivilous advanced obscure functionality. Like who would want to have emails pre-sorted into any folder except inbox? Shame on you for using email wrong I guess. I’ll skip over the part where there’s multiple versions of the multiple forks of outlook. But there’s also Government, Education, Student, Trial, Free, Standard, Pro, Business, Business pro, Business premium, etc. The last infuriating point in my rant has to come down to their naming standards. For some reason they keep renaming something old to a completely new name and of all the names they could pick, it’s not only something that already exists but it’s another Microsoft product. This is a nightmare trying to explain to somebody who is only familiar or aware of either the old or the new name and this confusion is often mixed even on a technically capable and competent team. For bonus points, the name has to be something generic. Even like “Windows” which is not a great example because the operating system is so popular but you can imagine similarly named things causing search confusion. Or even imagine trying to search for the GUI box thing that displays files in a folder within the operating system, also called a window, and try to imagine debugging an obscure technical problem about that while getting relevant information. There’s so many Microsoft moments that things like adding AI to notepad hardly phase me anymore. I don’t like that they do that but I wouldn’t necessarily be so offended if their own description they came up with in the first place was what you mentioned. Constantly going against their own information they invented themselves and chose to state as a core statement just irritates me.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago

I took a screenshot and pasted it into the new Win11 Paint. Even minimized, Paint was constantly using 5% CPU and sitting at ~250MB of RAM. I guess I can begrudgingly get over the RAM, but squandering the CPU like that is ridiculous. What happened to pride or quality control or anything?

hulitu 1y ago
> What happened to pride or quality control or anything? We are talking about Microsoft here.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  Exactly. Their software has always been shit. Microsoft didn’t become dominant because of the quality of their software. They became dominant because they knew how to run a an aggressively successful business better than their competitors.
dogleash 1y ago
>What happened to pride or quality control or anything? Sounds like some dangerous cowboy coding wrongthink you've got going on over there.
jandrese 1y ago
I assume it is basically an Electron app now. Anything will be bloated when it's a full web browser running some webapp.
- contextfree 1y ago
  No, it doesn't use Electron or webviews afaik. The UI is mostly WinUI2/UWP/XAML Islands based however
  - jandrese 1y ago
    If that's the case then why is it so heavy? In comparison The Gimp consumes about 80MB of memory and burns a trivial amount of when not being actively used.