7 ms·
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
by spikej 8mo ago
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
- SilasX 8mo agoThis. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options! And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
- mrec 8mo agoRe "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
- uxcolumbo 8mo agoUse MetaPad - like Notepad. https://liquidninja.com/metapad/ https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
- baal80spam 8mo agoI recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++
- wtetzner 8mo agoWasn't Wordpad the rich text editor on Windows?
- pico303 8mo agoI remember reading that even the Start menu is now a React app.
- ziml77 8mo agoReact Native*
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo agoApparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.
- zaruvi 8mo agoRegardless, at least a few of my colleagues using Windows have reported issues with the new start menu. It seems very slow, and sometimes you have to close & reopen it for content to appear.
- lossyalgo 8mo agoSearching for things via the Start menu is also totally hit or miss, on 5 different PCs that I regularly use, especially trying to open "Add or Remove Programs" (as described in an earlier comment).
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo agoOh completely agreed on the start menu being slower. I don’t use it anymore. Fortunately since my windows usage is restricted only to work and I have an ultra wide monitor, I’m able to pin all the apps I need on the taskbar. With the Win + # shortcuts I can avoid the start menu completely. In the past I didn’t use the taskbar at all and depended on Win + search entirely.
- api 8mo agoThe reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs. Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else. The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third. This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it. Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena. It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
- secondcoming 8mo agoThat makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.
- api 8mo agoThat means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++. Your expensive senior and staff level devs are on more important projects. Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.
- ncpa-cpl 8mo agoAnd Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.
- dmitrygr 8mo agoI still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.
- RankingMember 8mo agoIf I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows
- netsharc 8mo agoI wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it... Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
- dmitrygr 8mo agoThis reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.
- kyboren 8mo agoI'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.
- 8mo ago
- Rohansi 8mo agoBut Notepad is not web based? It's still a native app but now uses UWP instead.
- pjmlp 8mo agoWhich is exactly the problem, and isn't UWP, rather WinUI/WinAppSDK, the WinRT version on top of Win32, instead of UWP. UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.
- da_grift_shift 8mo agoUWP, one of the 10+ frameworks used to run Windows 11's system components. Wonderful! Exemplary! https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
- Rohansi 8mo agoThose are design languages/styles, not frameworks. There is a fewer number of frameworks but it's still a handful. Win32, WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc... but at least they're fairly consistent at using UWP for system UI, with older bits using Win32 still.
- pxoe 8mo agoWhat does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point? New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy. There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
- novaleaf 8mo agoI see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines. Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.
- brewmarche 8mo agoI think I had to disable spellcheck to fix the ignored keystrokes, it happened even after disabling formatting
- novaleaf 8mo agoahh, it might have been spellcheck then. I turned off all that stuff. In the heat of the moment, maybe I was a bit too angry to do proper root cause analysis :P
- tartoran 8mo agoI've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.
- derf_ 8mo agoI do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered. The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.