The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.

I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.

Operating systems should always use C/C++ UI frameworks, and as little costly abstraction as possible, period. Anything else is wasting resources.

I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.

And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.

> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.

At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations

I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.

Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.

But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.

Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.

Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?

For whom?

Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.

It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.

I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.

I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.

Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.

As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.

Sucks a whole lot less for users though.

I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.

After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.

Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.

That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.

I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.

If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.

But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.

SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.

and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches

the thing you need to trust is that pressing that combination shows the legit OS stuff, that it can't be intercepted (Secure Attention Key).

how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant

windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes

What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.

It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.

Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.

I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.

You can dislike the visual approach of modern macOS but on a framework level the UI ecosystem is generally very powerful and feature rich.

With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.

It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.

Both are absolutely fine. I don't get it.

I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.

Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.

But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.

> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.

When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).

Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.

> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.

Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:

- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.

- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.

- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.

This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.

Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.

> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.

JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.

> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.

What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.

In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".

So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.

The last point is very astute.

The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.

> is of zero consequence to me

It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.

It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.