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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

> Traditional Windows apps all use system provided common controls, because they are good, and therefore they have a consistent look and feel, even through OS updates.

This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006.

I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than the native (whatever that means) toolkits in much less time. It is easier to get a decent color picker in a web app than a WPF, WinForms, UWP, WinUI, or Win32 app (assuming you have a reasonably high expectation for UI/UX, as I do).

Even Office and Visual Studio (not Code) are using web technologies to render substantial parts of the UI.

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> I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than the native (whatever that means) toolkits in much less time. It is easier to get a decent color picker in a web app than a WPF, WinForms, UWP, WinUI, or Win32 app (assuming you have a reasonably high expectation for UI/UX, as I do).

I'll grant you that it's probably easier and cheaper to get a workable "color picker in a web app," but I don't grant that going that route will get you a "better app than the native."

The reason why the web stuff is taking over is because it's cheaper while providing minimally-viable functionality, full stop. It's not actually good in any other way.

IMHO, the trend here is similar to the one consumer printers took.

The word “cheaper” here is doing a lot of work.

Yes, it’s cheaper, meaning that it allows you to ship more stuff faster. You could make the argument that this results in lower quality, but this isn’t always the case. (For example, VS Code feels great!)

Still, I’d often rather have twice the features at 80% the quality, instead of an extremely high quality product that doesn’t have the features I need.

Cheapness leads to abundance leads to innovation.

VSCode is adequate, not great. The bar for responsive and minimal application is so bad these days thanks to web apps.

You can make fast web apps and you can make slow native apps. Check out VSCode's older brother and be amazed by how unresponsive and glitchy is.

The move to WPF in 2010 killed VS. Even today on today's computers it isn't as responsive as VS2008 was.

VSCode replace Sublime, Visual Studio(full) and IntelliJ IDEs for so many developers. It has all the features >90% of developers and it is faster than VS and IntelliJ IDEs

And it doesn't support window and monitor layouts that were possible and useful in Visual Studio 2003, or probably earlier.

Agree. VS Code is simply not comparable to a full blown IDE. It's a text editor with some integrated language tooling.

Of course it is comparable. They are not quite the same thing, sure, but for many people they are definitely comparable and more often than not, VSCode is the better option. It may not support some things, but the same can be said about the “full blown IDE”.

bold statement, as you claim that VS Code would fit the majority better than say $IDE from JetBrains.

I don't know how you came to that conclusion but I'd guess that you mostly work on small projects? (where I'd say smallish is < 100K LOC)

Stuff I'd miss in VS Code coming from JetBrains Rider:

- Docking of panels to top, bottom, left, right

- built-in database explorer (with table designer, script runner, ...)

- built-in unit test explorer

- built-in memory/perf profiler (not talking about a simple text interface!)

- nice config options of project settings (in either text with completion or the UI)

- NuGet package explorer UI

- integrated IL viewer

- great git blame / annotation view

... could continue for a while

tngranados said "many people" and did not say anything at all about the "majority" of people.

Judging from the fact that many people choose VS Code over JetBrains IDEs, despite being aware of JetBrains existence as an option, seems to be prima facie evidence that it is in fact the better choice for those folks.

It offers about 5 to 10 percent of all functionality of an IDE like IDEA. Much like devs on emacs and vim, most devs on VS Code have literally no idea what an IDE offers [1].

The things that worked in VS Code's favor:

- free. "All software must be free as in beer" is still a prevailing thought in IT, and people are loathe to pay for anything, even if that anything is extremely useful and very difficult to realise and support. On top of that IDEA still has a reputation of being expensive

- reasonably fast

- plugin system is decent and much easier to get into than IDEA, to keep IDEA as an example

- LSP is an overmarketed hype, but it worked in VSCode's immense favor. While it only covers a tiny sliver of things needed for a fully featured IDE, it covers enough of the important features, and is easy enough to implement. This way even languages that never had anything decent beyond broken syntax highlights in emacs and vim now enjoy at the very least an autocomplete

[1] Code refactoring alone is dozens of pages in IDEA docs https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code....

Have you tried Lapce? It's way snappier than VSCode.

It's great and the best desktop app I've ever used.

I'm sorry for you if it's the best that you have ever experienced. It is very subpar and slow.

It's the best electron app I've ever used. It's so much faster than anything else I've seen use electron.

That's quite the back-handed compliment though, isn't it?

Not really, I’d say VS Code is the only electron app that can stand up to native apps. It’s not the best, but it’s pretty good.

Now, for electron, it’s certainly not a compliment. From electron apps I’ve used, only VS Code is great, Discord is good, and everything else is just really, really bad. It’s apparently extremely hard to use electron and have something close to decent performance.

Right, sorry, I meant back-handed for Electron. I have used VS Code a bit for a class, but am usually an Emacs user.

Hah, nah. Electron gets no compliment at all, backhanded or otherwise. When almost no one can create an app on it that doesn't suck, there are deep issues.

We're taking about a trillion dollar company who can afford all of the talent and has very limited time pressure. I would prefer they do it correctly.

This misses the point. A trillion dollars goes a lot further when the software is cheaper.

But VSCode isn't cheaper. They had to pour millions of dollars and countless man hours into it. And none of those translated into any meaningful improvements of the platform.

It isn't cheap wrt hardware requirements either. My 2.5 year old work laptop becomes unbelievably sluggish if I have to keep multiple Electron apps open.

Innovation? More like W95 (or even ME) compared to NT, and don't even start to compare ME against BSD/Solaris/Linux or Mac OS X.

VS Code isn’t a web app. The first release was and since then most of it has been rewritten to be a native app.

Are you sure?

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/vscode-web

I think I agree with you, but I need a clear definition of "cheaper."

To me, "cheaper" means that companies are putting fewer resources into Windows-specific app development. That's not unexpected, given large portions of their user base are using MacOS, Android, or iOS. Why would I hire 8 developers to make 4 apps, when I could hire 6 developers to make make 3 or even 2 apps? Oh, as an added bonus, now my app can also be loaded straight from a browser, no installation necessary? And I don't have nagging complaints from small-market-share users (Linux and BSD) complaining that my app doesn't work on their machines? Seems like a no-brainer.

From a business perspective, if the end product is good enough that the customers don't complain, what reason is there to not* use web technologies?

Don't get me wrong, I hate that half the software I use today is just a glorified Chrome tab. I hate how I need 16GB of RAM to do my job.

> I think I agree with you, but I need a clear definition of "cheaper."

I think the best definition of MS products in regard with quality and usability is "cheaper" as in "he is cheap". (i.e. only using the lowest quality crap available)

Lazarus will target MacOS, Windows, Linux and all the BSD's creating binaries for all of them from a single source.

Also the deployment makes much more sense in the web. Users are always in the latest version of the software with no install / update shenanigans. This has other implications as well. The application may change internal formats since it doesn't have to worry about older instances of itself etc.

And if you build an updater in your app like chrome / firefox then it needs to be disabled for Linux distributions that have their own package manager.

> It is easier to get a decent color picker in a web app than a WPF, WinForms, UWP, WinUI, or Win32 app (assuming you have a reasonably high expectation for UI/UX, as I do).

What is a decent color picker? Everybody's idea about that is different so basically no 2 websites use the same color picker. In fact, this paper [1] found that the kind of picker (RGB vs HSV, etc...) doesn't really matter, but that better feedback made the difference. So will we get instant feedback from our color pickers now (for example text immediately turning into the color selected)? No, because designers design how they think it should look and feel, not based on how people actually interact with applications.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220183526_Model_and...

This one looks pretty solid. There are loads of them. The demos I’ve seen all showcase live feedback.

https://superguigui.github.io/simple-color-picker/

Compare to the best I can find for WPF: https://github.com/dsafa/wpf-color-picker - no live feedback, dialog only, no documented support for modern .NET. There are some commercial controls available from syncfusion and the like if you want to pay for such things.

Compare to color dialog in WinForms: https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf/issues/72

WinUI has a decent color picker, but there are other trade offs going with WinUI that make it inferior to the web environment (e.g. broken rendering of SVG/paths).

> This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista

Yes, I believe the Windows UI (at least until 10 since I haven't tested 11 deeply) is becoming increasingly inconsistent because of the many UI frameworks out there. And, while I understand that each app's developer is free to choose whatever framework UI they feel is right for them, I find it hard to understand why Microsoft is not sticking with a consistent framework for all of its apps, it went even far by using Electron for its Teams app! However, the thing that I might never get is: Why is Windows itself (and its system apps, i.e Calculator, Notepad) isn't sticking to a single framework? Yesterday, at night, I turned "Dark Mode" on and was surprised to see that "Task Manager" keeps its Light theme. It's weird how Notepad++ has a "Dark" theme while Task Manager has not!

To "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", check https://youtu.be/hn5QjtpjW_U

The latest Windows 11 update just switched the task manager to the new UI style with support for dark theme.

I didn't think it's a good video. If Microsoft s latest apps don't have a consistent design, they have spent more money on designing each of them separately. Each of those hover effects and custom title bars needed to be coded separately. That undermines the idea that MS "hasn't prioritised spending on design because it won't help their enterprise customers" and shows it's just an organisational problem.

> This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006.

Ignoring 3rd party apps, to me the windows UI died with XP where the consistency stopped being somewhat pushed on the base OS/UX itself.

Strictly speaking nobody cares what APIs are being used or if there are multiple of them as long as they convey a consistent UX. If a consistent UX is pushed on a system level, even custom apps will try to stick to it (see macos).

But the sad truth is that on windows there is no longer one. W10 can show you dialogs from the windows 3.1 style up to a WPA, and you'll likely encounter a mixture all the time because there's no consistency.

I sometimes watch retro hw channels and looking at windows from 3 to 2k reminds me the stark difference.

Office is using web technologies because they don't want to rewrite their code for Office 365, so native users get the Web stuff on a Web widget instead of a proper native UI.

Which is kind of tragic, given how Office was the testing ground for many Windows UI components.

What are you even talking about the only non native app in the office package is teams…

https://www.office.com/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/office-ui-f...

????? Nobody is saying that there aren’t webviews in office I am saying that your statement that most of the desktop office ui is now non native is false and misleading. After reading your other comments in the thread it seems like more of a personal vendetta than factual statements. lmao

Nope, you're the one interpreting that way, I only mentioned that they are adopting Web stuff as means to reduce code duplication between Web and desktop, via Webviews exactly.

So unless you're on the Office team and want to tell us anything, please do lmao.

Who cares if it just works? Who cars if it's made in Flash or in COBOL when it just works? What's sad about this? It just works right?

That's the problem: it does not work. I don't care if the programm is written in assembly or in rust as long as it functions properly. But when the blinking cursor stops blinking, when the scrollbar or window border is so thin that i cannot select it with a mouse, when the title bar is so cluttered with buttons that any click brings up a menu instead of being able to double click or click and hold, then _it matters_.

I stop here in order to not throw profanity at MS engineers.

This is evidenced by the layers of settings UIs in modern windows from old school systems properties dialog to newfangled display settings, and in between. It is horrible. They just bundle these UIs atop one another there is no overall usability oversight.

> Even Office and Visual Studio (not Code) are using web technologies to render substantial parts of the UI.

Any more details on what web technologies are being used in Visual Studio and what parts of the UI are done with web?

The Diagnostic Tools window is implemented as a web view, probably since its introduction in… VS2017?. I’m not aware of any other GUI parts implemented using web technologies.

Node.js processes are invisible backend stuff.

This is what I was thinking of. Kind of a telling statement of Microsoft’s perception of WPF when they turn to WebView2 to render newer parts of the UI in their WPF app (which was never ported to WinRT, UWP, or WinUI). They didn’t even use XAML islands for the newer parts, they just jumped straight to web.

You just have to peek into what is running as child process from VS, as node.exe instances.

Mostly related to Web stuff, Blazor or VSCode plugins that they are "porting" into VS.

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