Electron apps are ruining the Windows 11 experience, and even the JavaScript creator has warned against ‘rushed web UX over native,’ but it doesn’t look like that will change Microsoft’s plans. In a post on X and other places, Microsoft reaffirmed its commitment to AI in Windows 11 and encouraged Electron developers to consider using AI in their apps.
Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.
Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.
Yeah sounds like an AI agent decided that.
What do we say?
MAKE… IT… SHITTY.
this solidifies two of my predictions from 15-20 years ago.
- Microsoft is moving to an “internet required” OS, likely meaning cloud based OS
- all apps will become web apps
my final prediction from then was subscription based access to your operating system, apps, and data. you own nothing. your data is constantly consumed and used to train their products. you will never be able to extract your data and will be forever locked-in to their product. this also means that you will have to pay extra for app use. need to use Photoshop? that’s an extra fee. need to use 3D rendering software? thats the ultra package with GPU fees per hour.
most of this is actually happening under the covers, but nothing is locking us in.
I would say we have about 5-7 years before the above happens and there’s no way back.
Microslop Winslop 11 with Electroslop
The one thing Apple has done an amazing job of over the years is providing a solid, clean, common application framework for all of their systems.
They’ve fucked it up recently, but basically, 90% of the time you’d get the same consistent interface design across all apps, with common design language and iconography and accessibility features. They aggressively deprecate so you have to keep that $100 dev fee rolling, but the experience has been good for the the better part of 20 years (post carbon & X11, pre-liquid ass, the cocoa years).
If everything on Windows is a vibe-coded web app then everything is going to look like different, feel like shit to use, and perform like shit.
How has Apple fucked up recently?
As an avid Apple user the most recent ui changes are unfathomably bad. The os has become notably less useful to me in som frustrating ways. I can solve some but not all of it through settings.
Idk I’ve really liked it. Accessibility was an issue in the demos, it’s not anymore; the changes are purely aesthetic and tbf it does look nice
The transparency is still painful for me. And I used to be able to two finger click on my apps app to see a list of all apps that I could quickly scroll to and get. Instead of that quick and easy interaction now I get a window that pops up and forces me to type search Params, and it always has the last thing I searched in there so I can’t just scroll. It turned a “two finger click, scroll, one finger click” activity I could do with a single hand into “click, click, hold backspace, type Params, click” activity that is way less convenient and requires both hands.
ngl I did make the jump to liquid glass on Macos, but for iOs I started on liquid glass (and quickly came back to Android once I realised I could not stand youtube without adblock and sponsorblock), so I definitely did not miss features and did like the looks of the UI
If everything on Windows is a vibe-coded web app then everything is going to look like different, feel like shit to use, and perform like shit.
I am happy to report: Windows apps that look different, feel shit to use and perform like shit are already available!
E.g. Teams, the CPU warmer from hell, was rolled out to Windows long ago. It was coded for Electron and couldn’t even integrate with Microsoft Windows’ taskbar popups. They had to fake one by creating a window that moved itself up from below the screen. Did this break when you changed resolution? Yes it did. Did it break when you moved the taskbar? Yes it did. Did it break when- YES IT DID
The one thing Apple has done an amazing job of over the years is providing a solid, clean, common application framework for all of their systems.
iOS doesn’t even have a universal back button, every app has their own way of implementing it.
If your app uses NavigationView, like 80% of apps, you get a back button and swipe gesture for free.
What is it with Android users’ obsession with the back button? Who actually cares? Why would I want some button that goes back to the wrong app for some reason?
Tell me you haven’t used a back button without telling me.
To TLDR you pretend the back button on android is the back button on your mouse, because it is. Does it seem useful yet?
Back button on a mouse? I use a Trackpad. If I wanted to spend all day slowly navigating the UI click by click I might go back to a mouse.
And by the way, the reason I know it takes you back to an entirely different app than the one you’re using is because I’ve used it before. 😒
It takes you back to the previous view in the stack. Unless the current app was launched from a different app, there will be no other app in the view stack to go back to.
TL;DR: You’re full of shit, and anyone familiar with how Android handles view state under the hood knows it.
Right, why would you need a physical hardware button to go back to the last app? It’s treating the entire OS like a single tab in a web browser.
TL;DR: You have no reading comprehension. Also, why do you need to summarize your comments? It wasn’t even long.
Who actually cares?
Every people that complains, for one. And the “back” feature, with apps that follows the guidelines, is quite useful and consistent.
Apple has a universal app switcher gesture that is harder to accidentally invoke. It used to use the home button before for that when it was on the front of the device.
The back button on Android just feels like Chromebook bullshit to me.
Apple has a universal app switcher gesture that is harder to accidentally invoke.
Try teaching your 90-year-old mother to use that fucking gesture. Lol “Apple is so intuitive”.
I have a literal 85 year old father in law with mild dementia who uses his iPhone and iPad just fine. It literally is intuitive.
The back button is just completely unnecessary. Imagine not knowing how to get back to something because the UI is atrocious so you revert to relying on a hardware key. 😷
Android - provides a back button that has the same look, location and functionality system wide so that users don’t how to figure out how each individual application decide to implement (or not) go back functionality
Cousin Mose - the UI is attrocious.
Thanks for letting us know that no one should listen to your opinions on UI / UX ever lol
Lol so funny 😭
Lack of constraints has killed everything. I hope all the RAM and storage becomes unusable people are forced to work with 3mb again.
Nah, they’ll just push for streaming compute power and charge you once more!
I’m just waiting for their reaction when everyone is supposed to use cloud desktops and the average application assumes the user has 128 GB of RAM.
You mean when care was taken while coding and an OS could "run on 1GB but suffice with 2GB? I know everyone hated Win 8 but it was a welcomed change plus no bullshit on it at the time.
Since the mid 2000s desktop OSs haven‘t done anything fundamentally new until AI integration. Hardware accelerated compositing was the last big step. That was done with a couple of MBs on the graphics chip and less than 1 GB of RAM.
Yeah, 8.1 took like 800 megs ootb, while 10 wanted about 3 gigs to itself (not sure about earlier versions, tho; mb enshitification happened gradually)
Real men remember when windows vista launched like shit because it assumed there were way more brand new high memory machines out there than there actually was
Can thank Intel for that, they pressured MS to lower the documented requirements so they could sell more low-end hardware.
Of course, MS executives also gladly went along with it, not like they’re innocent in any way.
Also Nvidia and their drivers caused issues, as usual.
It was also a mess as there was a lot of confusion around “64-bit” and “32-bit” systems that even most retailers weren’t sure how to describe. Dude it was entertaining talking to best buy his who weren’t even sure how to explain it all and the compatibility issues.
I didn’t like Vista myself, but 8 seemed to be modernized enough and get away from Aero icons and glassy things.
Vista is the reason I started using Linux.
Unix was the reason I started using Linux.
I wouldn’t call Win 8 welcome, most people rather hated it. Then again, following Windows 7, which I the best of the bunch, couldn’t have been easy. MS just bet that the future of Windows was tablets and the world replied “lol no”.
Meanwhile the real future was smartphones and MS was like “lol no”.
I remember having a conversation with an MS salesman whose job was to plug Windows Mobile 6.5 … after the iPhone had come out. He had that sad quaver in his voice that people get when they know their task is futile.
I grew up with Windows 95 and later XP…
I remember watching the slow downfall ever since Office 2004 (or maybe that was the last one I liked, can’t remember if it was that or 2000) when they changed from primarily using toolbars with submenus to hiding everything in different tabs.
Like, I could find everything I needed to on the classic toolbars. The tabs, I never got used to…
I’ve hated enshittification since before there was even a word for it.
I strongly considered using Mate when I switched to Linux, but KDE is so sleek and I’m settling into it quite nicely. Plus, LibreOffice lets you choose your toolbar style, so I already have the classic version.
All my life I thought I hated computers, until I finally tried Linux. Then I realized I just hate Windows (and Mac, I tried Mac and hated it too).
I think I put off trying Linux for so long because I thought I was incompetent based on my experience with Windows, so I didn’t think I could learn Linux. I was wrong, and some of the beginner-friendly distros make it so easy.
I wonder if Windows does that on purpose, like an abuser who gaslights their victims by telling them they couldn’t make it on their own, that they need them, when they’re the ones holding them back…
Today it took almost 30 seconds for the context menu to appear when I right clicked on a file in windows explorer. I mean ffs, if I wanted everything to be a browser, I’d use a chromebook.
(Inb4 “install linux”, it’s a work computer and I don’t get a say in OS)
Just like the good old days of running Windows 3.1 on an Intel 386sx. We’ve come full circle.
Win 3.1 wasn’t even that slow on a 386sx (yay, 386 buddies! o/), its nothing compared to Win 11 on midrange and lower laptops these days. Then again, those CPUs usually came in PCs with Win 3.0, so Win 3.1 was definitely noticeably heavier. MS also wasn’t nearly as large and well funded back then, there is no excuse for this other than pure incompetence.
Win 11 feels like i replaced by SSD with an HDD. I’m half convinced that they’re making it as awful as possible so when the whole OS as a service thing arrives, it’ll feel super snappy.
I will say that LTSC runs way smoother than regular windows, but that’s almost certainly because it’s got a lot of the bullshit stripped out.
Dude. Same. Windows 11 at work is fucking awful.
My laptop idles at 12 out of 16 gigs of RAM free.
Right clicking takes dozens of seconds, especially on a network share.
Did IT remove a letter mapped network drive? Haha! Fuck you! Windows hangs indefinitely if you open Windows explorer. You gotta fuck around in the registry to remove that shit.
The only good thing about windows 11 is tabs in Windows explorer. Which MacOS and Linux have had for a gazillion years.
Microsoft don’t care about file shares anymore anyway, they want you to sign up for OneDrive :(
All our network shares are Azure hosted, so Microslop is getting corporate $$$ regardless. And I think that bug has been around since forever.
This reminds me that many years ago, there was a small market for better file managers in Windows. Most were more like “side grades” that were better in some ways, but worse than others, but there was one that was way better than all of them called Directory Opus. It was silly expensive for the time (I want to say like $80), and most others were free, but holy shit was it feature filled, including tabs, and just really good. It was also a bit heavy compared to explorer back then. Now it probably runs insanely fast and is still way better. I just looked and it still exists at basically the same price, but any sane person considering it should just leave Windows.
I use a Norton Commander clone (Total Commander) lol. Having a huge list of bookmarks in a drop-down menu with subfolders is super helpful for my work.
NC and Total Commander are honestly great and probably greatly preferrable to Windows Explorer these days.
Tell corporate to give you more RAM or let you choose a lighter operating system 🤷♀️
I can’t even type normally anymore in teams. Since it will hang my business laptop during typing. It’s so awful.
Really Teams is the worst product.
Look into cleaning up your context menu shell extensions: just a single bad one will freeze your context menu exactly how you described it.
Unfortunately, I have literally zero control over what’s installed on my computer at work
Do you have access to HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the registry? You can usually edit this even without admin rights.
I went back to the old Win10 right click menu by this method on my work PC, which sped things up substantially
I actually have a batch script (might be a powershell script?) with this and some other stuff in it for when I’m doing a fresh install on my pc.
My work pc is locked the fuck down though, I can’t even change my wallpaper or the color of the taskbar lol.
work computer, Win 11, here. I need to lock my PC when I leave my desk. Over the last month or 2 (maybe more?) when I 3 finger salute to lock, it used to open in a moment, now I can count to at least 4 before the screen comes up
Windows+L locks it directly, fyi
Oh, nice, tks. too bad they have destroyed many of our trust. Thankfully there is no win 11 at home on any pc and only 1 win 10 that I do not maintain. GF and I are both on linux
Theres another windows+L shortcut as well, windows+ctrl+shift+alt+l. It opens linkedin. Because why not
Oh man I forgot about that one. Dumbest shit ever, I love it
Even in Edge, Outlook (a Microslop web app running on a Microslop browser) sometimes takes up to a minute to load on refresh. HOW!? God I hate that company.
I’ve never had outlook take long, always done in about 5 seconds. Firefox too, which would be the last to optimise for.
Lmao yup, the desktop app ‘new’ outlook takes up to 30 minutes to load sometimes
Me every day at work.
It’s even worse working in the company’s network drive.
But damn, it often takes ages for a right click to appear in the goddamned downloads folder (which is in its default C drive location…)
I feel you pain friend.
Oh god don’t even get me started on our network drives lol. Searching for part drawings can take HOURS
As long as you’re getting paid for those 30 seconds, it’s the shareholders’ problem. Keep your blood cool, take a sip of coffee and sit back. Twiddle with a thingamajig on your desk.
If your supervisor asks what you’re doing, say “waiting for Windows to load”. Because that’s what you’re doing, and if they don’t like it then they should let you use a different OS.
Install linux
When I started at my last job, I asked for a mac; I worked on Linux, Windows (wsl), and wanted a change. Most of my collegues (in the dev team) initially asked for a windows PC, but literally everyone ended up on Mac.
Windows is only usable when the WSL is set up and then you basically work exclusively on that VM lol, I literally cannot understand how anyone puts up with this OS. Any other OS is excellent just by comparison.
It doesn’t make sense to stay locked into the Mac environment unless the hardware is incredible or you need to develop iOS applications.
MacOS doesn’t really lock you at all though, and you’re free to dev for pretty much any software there, iOS or not
It’s not really a matter of preference. I’m a mechanical engineer, not a developer, and several industry-standard programs are only available for windows. Bugs that come from running in WINE or another emulation layer are unacceptable when they can potentially cause delays in production, scrap parts from a misprint or miscalculation, or lead to a part failure that kills someone.
Oh yeah I’m aware that some professionals are essentially locked to a single platform (same goes with accounting and Excel), I can only hope that the industries this affects start taking Linux more seriously (or Mac, but tbh once you’re running on Mac it’s less of a leap to work on Linux)
Hi, uh- just incase Slopya Nadella of Microslop happens to read the comments here one day,
Slopya- please take your sloperating system, print the slop code on A4 paper, fold it until it’s all corners. When done, insert rectally.Inner-platform effect in full swing. Windows exists only to run Chrome. Chrome is the new OS layer.
Microsoft also make the one app that actually shines in electron: vs code. It’s really quite optimised. But somehow they didn’t bother learning lessons from that and keep rolling out terrible slop like teams and new outlook.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.
The way MS is structured internally, this is like being surprised that some NFL teams win the Super Bowl and some teams are the Cleveland Browns.
I just realized I’ve been staring at this picture for over a minute, trying to figure out what it means. What does this picture mean?
Part of a old joke about various big tech org charts. Microsoft divisions are purported to be in not only fighting with each other but also within themselves.
Even thought Microsoft is one company, all the internal teams are separate, don’t communicate and usually do what they want with no regard to anything else the other teams are doing. Been an issue with Microslop for years, and its especially noticeable in their office/email divisions.
Ahh. That seems suboptimal and makes the picture make a lot more sense, thanks.
It’s missing the arm that has the gun pointed at themselves.
Tbf vscode has opensource contributors and they had the code for atom text editor (by developers of electron and github) to look as reference code.
Rip Atom, it’s a shame microsoft bought github and ended your development to promote their IDE. Who could have known they have no morals.
Atom was indeed very good. There are still forks out there.
I can’t stand VScode, whoever decided a text editor should be written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript deserves to be shot
Isn’t VS Code open-sourced? Can those optimizations be contributed to the wider community of electron experts?
I guess my point is VS Code works well because the users can fix it and they have the ability to do so. The same cant be said for Teams & Outlook. No one can fix that PoS.
And code is stolen from atom. But yes.
The next step in app delivery is shipping a full VM with the operating system and the app.
Docker?
Minesweeper as a Docker container.
Snap/Flatpak basically (I know containers are not exactly VMs)
This sentence reads like Microsoft is the inventor of Javascript:
Electron apps are ruining the Windows 11 experience, and even the JavaScript creator has warned against ‘rushed web UX over native,’
So there’s 3 things, either they meant Typescript, they are very wrong or they’re quoting Brendan Eich and not attributing it to him.
Yes.
We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.
If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android.
Verifiable programming (which tends to involve lower level languages) is much “better” with LLMs. Take this recent one, for example:
https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Leanstral-2603
Leanstral is the first open-source code agent designed for Lean 4, a proof assistant capable of expressing complex mathematical objects such as perfectoid spaces and software specifications like properties of Rust fragments.
