>The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time)
Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.
Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.
...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198
From what I understand, the thinking is something like:
- There currently aren't any great alternatives for an attractive, touch-friendly, modern-looking UI framework. UWP applications generally feel pretty good to use despite UWP's problems.
- MS already has to support UWP apps forever (once something ships with Windows it's immortal), so they might as well take advantage of that support guarantee.
The Windows team is currently investing heavily in Chromium/Edge/WebView2, but it's still fairly early days. I'd bet good money that within the next 5 years, web UI in some form will fully replace UWP for new first-party development.
UWP was burdened with sandboxing+packaging requirements that made it very difficult to use, even for first-party software. They eventually figured that out and have made some attempts to lift UI stuff out of UWP (XAML Islands and WinUI 3), but they're both train wrecks (and not staffed with nearly enough people to put up a fight against Chromium).