The 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.
In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.
Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.
Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.
>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
That 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.
This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.
The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.
The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that
other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.
web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))
I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.
Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
I 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.
I 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.
What 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.
I 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.
I'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.
This. 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.
Re "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.
api|1 month ago
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.
eXpl0it3r|1 month ago
Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.
Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
PlanksVariable|1 month ago
SilasX|1 month ago
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
Scubabear68|1 month ago
Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.
secondcoming|1 month ago
runako|1 month ago
> it's hard to hire native UI developers
This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.
mhjkl|1 month ago
anthk|1 month ago
You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.
hulitu|1 month ago
Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).
renegade-otter|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
tarsinge|1 month ago
emeril|1 month ago
steve1977|1 month ago
ncpa-cpl|1 month ago
kyboren|1 month ago
Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
rleigh|1 month ago
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
dmitrygr|1 month ago
BoredPositron|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
derf_|1 month ago
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.
pico303|1 month ago
hshdhdhj4444|1 month ago
ziml77|1 month ago
pxoe|1 month ago
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|1 month ago
Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.
tartoran|1 month ago
itopaloglu83|1 month ago
inquirerGeneral|1 month ago
[deleted]
SilasX|1 month ago
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
mrec|1 month ago
baal80spam|1 month ago
uxcolumbo|1 month ago
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
wtetzner|1 month ago
Rohansi|1 month ago
da_grift_shift|1 month ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
pjmlp|1 month ago
UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.