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Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

I hope this leads to having a native vertical taskbar, which has been absent in W11 despite being a taskbar feature dating back as early as Windows 98.

Third-party tools have tried to reimplement it but it's either been by bastardizing the native W11 horizontal taskbar to be vertical (eg: Windhawk) or just restoring the old W10 taskbar code (eg: StartAllBack).

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How will making the UI framework open source lead to taskbar changes? For third party contributions in this area, they need to open source the taskbar, not the UI framework.

Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an option in its very first version.

> Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an option in its very first version.

Yes, but this was when computer were less capable. Now, you are not able to choose colors or fonts, the taskbar is fixed and the programs need at least 2 seconds to start. Terrific evolution.

The taskbar is a feature of explorer.exe.

The news being discussed is not about explorer being open sourced.

Is the Windows team even using WinUI for the native Win11 desktop UI? ;)

The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app, so I'm going to hazard a guess and just assume WinUI is built on top of React, and that the Start Menu at least is thus indeed built with WinUI. But it's also clear that some other parts aren't, so who knows what's what. I'm sure there are folks who spent time reverse engineering it all though who do.

The start menu is not a React Native app, but it's actually even worse. Only the recommended section (which is basically recently used files - plus probably advertisements in some scenarios) is. The rest of the start menu is WinUI, to my knowledge.

I cannot stand the latency using a local app. Same with rendering views of local file systems. Frontend reactivity as the expense of responsive performance is the problem with modern user interfaces in my opinion.

Like I’m searching for an installed app. I don’t need news articles about that and never expected a file system ui to be a web portal.

WinUI is its own thing. The React Native stuff just shows that even Windows developers don't want to use WinUI.

> The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app

What's the source for this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

So the source is a twitter meme?

Featuring a screencap of an MS engineer's talk from some React conference, yes.

The talk in question showcases a widget in the start menu that's using react native. Apart from the meme itself, I have not found indication of the start menu being a react native app. Every time this comes up it seems to always lead back to that meme.

That'd be correct. See also the top comment in that thread that (evidently after I originally read that thread) also explained exactly this, and a sibling comment in this thread tree that also did so (more than two hours after I posted my original comment, meaning I was unable to amend or delete it).

the talk is linked as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217

It's confusing what exactly 'WinUI' is, but does Explorer looks WinUI-ish. Parts of it at least.

Explorer uses XAML Islands. Parts of it are WinUI, while the rest is still Win32.

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