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Comment by tough | Hacker News Reader

so microsoft gave up and the web won?

swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc

Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement every few years that couldn't actually replace the original thing.

It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know "Windows".

Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and less capable than what came before.

I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.

WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.

The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio.

WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn.

I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.

nah WPF made way more sense than WinForm in its abstract design, as it supported flow/stack layout ideas instead of anchors like WinForm did. WinForm was much quicker to get started but had a fundamental flaw in that it couldn't really do transparency.

>and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement

I often feels modern Apple is the same. I mean we are 10 years into Swift, 6 years into Swift UI.

And it feels they are still in beta.

And yet it feels more polished than WinUI, that is how bad it has gotten.

What to expect when new interns have no clue about Windows, have been educated with macOS and ChromeOS, and the design team carries Apple devices?

Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, and still, not as many webviews all over the place.

MSHTML was the first Electron.

This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren’t have any experience with windows, it was something companies used, and today even that has gone away.

I promise you it has not "gone away" which is why Azure is so popular.

What does Azure have to do with windows these days?

Windows is still enforced and mandated on most corporate Fortune 100/500 companies computers.

Their "cloud lift" consists of putting vms into the cloud to run at 10x the cost. (Nothing else changed from The Old Ways)

And that's still where we are today for most enterprises.

That ecosystem has had them for 30+ years and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. If it doesn't have Active Directory and Office 365 or whatever they decided to call it today, they aren't interested.

Still not seeing the connection to Azure.

Yes, mshtml was insanely powerful. As an undergrad I was surprised how easy it was to build capable UIs with powerful visual effects[1] using mshtml and JS. Even for C++ Windows apps.

It took a long time for this to become a cross-platform reality, but it did inspire me to ignore distractions like XAML and focus on the web.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

Wasn't AD like one big security flaw after another?

I think web views do make sense in situations where you’re presenting lots of remote content that may frequently change. After all that’s what the web is, and store content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML anyway, are reasonable candidates.

yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra

but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters!

thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform

SwiftUI apps are not great and they're not fast. A lot of Apple's new apps are considered rather poor. Theo has a video where some devs switched to a webview because the text rendering performed better!

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