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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

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.

nine_k 1y ago
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.
- p_ing 1y ago
  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.
  - mroche 1y ago
    > 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.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      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.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    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.
    - p_ing 1y ago
      Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down, right after they started looking into it.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    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.
    - larodi 1y ago
      It makes a lot of sense to wire COM and WASM in some smart way.
pjmlp 1y ago
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.
- tough 1y ago
  so microsoft gave up and the web won? swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc
  - simonh 1y ago
    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.
    - tough 1y ago
      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
      - sirwhinesalot 1y ago
        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!
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    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.
_fat_santa 1y ago
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.
- rs186 1y ago
  You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog: https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8 https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8
  - cosmotic 1y ago
    Yikes! Though nothing from Apple in 1993 still runs.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  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
- aprilnya 1y ago
  Control Panel is definitely a bad example, I do see them working little by little, update by update, to integrate everything into Settings
  - olyjohn 1y ago
    It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?
    - 1y ago
reactordev 1y ago
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.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >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.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    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?
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      >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.
      - reactordev 1y ago
        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.
        FirmwareBurner 1y ago
whalesalad 1y ago
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.
oniony 1y ago
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.

nine_k 1y ago

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.

p_ing 1y ago
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.
- mroche 1y ago
  > 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.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    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.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  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.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down, right after they started looking into it.
- nine_k 1y ago
  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.
  - larodi 1y ago
    It makes a lot of sense to wire COM and WASM in some smart way.

pjmlp 1y ago

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.

tough 1y ago
so microsoft gave up and the web won? swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc
- simonh 1y ago
  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.
  - tough 1y ago
    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
    - sirwhinesalot 1y ago
      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!
- pjmlp 1y ago
  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.

_fat_santa 1y ago

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.

rs186 1y ago
You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog: https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8 https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8
- cosmotic 1y ago
  Yikes! Though nothing from Apple in 1993 still runs.
tonyhart7 1y ago
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
aprilnya 1y ago
Control Panel is definitely a bad example, I do see them working little by little, update by update, to integrate everything into Settings
- olyjohn 1y ago
  It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?
  - 1y ago

reactordev 1y ago

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.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>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.
- reactordev 1y ago
  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?
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >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.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      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.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago

whalesalad 1y ago

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.

oniony 1y ago

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.