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Comment by dmayle | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a sign that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. There will be a day when Windows is left behind, and they want to make sure that they can continue to deliver the Microsoft experience, even on other platforms.

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I don’t think Windows is ever going to be left behind, you still need a kernel to make use of all your hardware and an OS to give users something to do. I view this move as Microsoft recognizing that the future of most development is cross-platform web technologies and they need to give Windows users reasons not to migrate to macOS and ChromeOS (though it’s ok if they do as long as they’re paying for O365 and Azure).

I think you're right, but that also poses the possibility that Windows will get left behind, as a kernel. If the future of development happens on the web, the significance of Windows as a kernel is going to greatly diminish. We've already reverse-engineered a huge amount of Windows API calls, and you can run vast amounts of fairly complex Windows software without the NT kernel at all.

If our future does shift towards thin-clients and web-browsers, MacOS and Windows will make increasingly less sense. Both OSes have a pretty significant amount of cruft and unjustified overhead which already seems unnecessary to a generation of Google Docs and Soundcloud users.

>"If our future does shift towards thin-clients and web-browsers"

Please no. I like to control what I have. No way for me to be fed by thin client. Sure I do not mind web apps / services where it makes sense (banking for example). But the possibility to be suddenly cut off for whatever reason (maybe my app provider does not like my political views) - fuck that. Or when everything goes through some portal what will prohibit from them jacking up subscription fees sky high? I understand by many developers wanting to use webapp hummer for everything but I think they're digging their own grave

Those problems are also realistically an issue for native apps. The internet is your distribution platform regardless of if the web is your target.

I would hope that the industry could work together to provide a comfortable cross-platform app development experience, but none of the big players bought-in. So now the web is our only option, and they're the ones to blame.

For what it is worth I distribute my products from my company's website. However little reputation I have is all mine. It does not depend on some portal. The revenue is all mine as well. Besides those products are heavy apps that use features not accessible from non native apps.

I don't see how an offline-first browser app is worse then a native app in terms of control.

My answer was in particular to: "If our future does shift towards thin-clients and web-browsers".

Thin client leaves processing to a server. It does not matter in this case if your "offline-first" UI is resident / cached on a client side. These are just glorified web bookmarks

> I don’t think Windows is ever going to be left behind

I do, but not for reasons most people think about.

The Windows 11 UI/UX is trying to emulate MacOS. Clearly, Microsoft is giving the finger to people that use Windows because it's not MacOS.

I can't wait for Windows 12 to happen and all the UX things I hate about MacOS get implemented in Windows. Might as well start training my muscle memory to hit the Windows key instead of CTRL now, so that when Microsoft decides that CTRL-X/C/V should be WIN-X/C/V, I'll be ready.

Or maybe I'll just switch to Linux.

In either case, I'll leave Windows behind.

Few years back everyone was complaining Apple was copying Microsoft by going all in on flat UIs.

While at MS I did run into the ever present problem of many designers only using MacOS so their designs would basically say "do what MacOS does!"[1] which entailed a lot of work by developers to change the default Windows UI widget behaviors to look like MacOS. Thankfully when I got one of those requests across my desk I was able to point and shout at MS's design language rules and say no. :/

[1] I don't think it was on purpose, I just think many designers have never used anything else and they didn't even realize other UIs exist outside of MacOS and iPhones. These problems started popping up when MS loosened up on their rules about only using MS products for development, it was a needed change but ugh, UX designers and their MacBooks...

I can't stand flat UIs.

Not having buttons be obviously clickable/touchable is a bug, not a feature, as is having UI elements blend in with each other.

I personally use WindowBlinds to make my Windows 10 UI look like Windows 2000. I love having a taskbar that has 3D buttons. I like not having multiple windows from a single program getting grouped together.

Windows 2000 (or Windows XP with the Classic theme enabled) was the best UI Windows ever had. It's been downhill ever since.

I agree, but I’ve always wondered if flat UIs had a performance advantage. Like, if your GPU just rendered a bunch of rectangles of a single color instead of having to mask rounded corners or draw borders around things, could the UI run with less resources? Maybe it’s conspiratorial but it helps me sleep at night as a remember not finding buttons during the day…

Considering we had 3D controls in the Windows 3.1 era when some people were still running on 25 Mhz 80386 CPUs and 4 MB of RAM, I'm not too worried about the performance impact.

> so that when Microsoft decides that CTRL-X/C/V should be WIN-X/C/V, I'll be ready

Already starting to go this route. While you can still ctrl-x/ctrl-v, most of their newer features implement the windows key, including win-v for paste using clipboard history.

While printscreen works, you can use win-s to take a screenshot now too.

Well as long as printscreen key still works, adding another shortcut is fine. And win+s isn't really that bad compared to Mac's ctrl+shift+alt+spacebar+F4+right-click or whatever it is. Mac has the worst, most bizzare 'short'cuts anyone ever come up with.

Windows isn't the only kernel and it's not a huge part of Micrsofts revenue

I think this is the wrong take.

Microsoft is trying to land on the PWA beachhead in an attempt to make mobile devices irrelevant and app agnostic.

Furthermore, they want to provide the tooling to develop and deploy into this ecosystem. Github, Github CI, VSCode, Azure, ...

They have been at it for as long as MSHTML exists, in various kinds of packaging.

Check Active Desktop, HTA, WinJS,...

I have to agree with this. Many Win32 things are disappearing, Azure is running on Linux and Microsoft is porting their major Win32 cash cow services to run on Linux as well.

Azure runs on Windows and Hyper-V

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