Hacker News Reader

Comment by spikej | Hacker News Reader

Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!

View on HN

The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.

The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.

This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.

Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.

It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.

I for one like the comparison of web apps with scrotums

That makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.

That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++. Your expensive senior and staff level devs are on more important projects.

Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.

But there's no need to change it, that's the point. It's a finished product pretty much. Just ship it as is.

If a PM needs NotepadAI for their career progression then start it from scratch.

Microsoft has the resources to train people.

But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32? You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.

For money, anything is possible. That’s the employment contract, trade money for time doing things you would rather not.

Indeed but if the pay needs to be high, you may as well pay someone experienced.

> But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32?

That's why they got the job, didn't they ? /s

They would want to learn Winforms/WPF/WinUI/whatever if microsoft could settle on one and use it. I suppose part of the react native stuff is that Microsoft hasn’t done a good job of making people, even in Microsoft, bet the farm on any of their “native” toolkits.

The delulu who think C/C++ is "sunsetting". Hilarious.

> But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32?

I'm pretty sure Microsoft can pay them enough to be happy to learn it.

> You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.

This seems like such an odd take when web frameworks seem to be obsolete almost as soon as you start using them. C++ has and will continue to be around for a very long time.

This is just the result of bad leadership at Microsoft.

Shouldn’t the AI technology that Microsoft is spending billions on make this trivial?

Notepad was basically the "Hello world" of win32 apps. A kid in highschool could have "maintained" it.

I don’t think you understand. Notepad was literally one of the examples that comes with the SDK. It doesn’t need any maintenance. As long as windows has a native SDK, notepad exists because it is basically the simplest GUI application, provided as a sample.

My first entry-level job just freshly coming out of the University was writing C++ with Qt for a computer vision app. And that was my actual first contact with C++ (had seen C and Java in Uni).

It was no biggie, just joining the low level of C with the class notions from Java. Pair that with the C++FAQ website, and it was easy.

Are entry-level devs generally not able to do that nowadays? I do not believe people are generally more stupid or less capable, so, is education so much worse or what's going on?

> That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++.

As far as I remember, Notepad was the reference implementation for a Microsoft widget. Nothing more. If "modern entry-mid level devs can't do that" you really have a much bigger problem.

The previous version would have been written in C rather than C++ since as someone else has said it's a very basic Windows application, more of a wrapper around the edit control than anything more complicated.

These days it would have to be written in some other language that has those Windows Runtime bindings available for it. So could be C++ but if I were to guess I'd say it's written in Typescript and compiled to a native or .Net binary.

>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

This ... has been very opposite of my experience:

1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)

2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".

Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.

There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.

That can work if you're not expecting to be fired on a whim in one of those 20k+ layoffs when suddenly you have a skill no one seeks while you have not grown in the other area the market wants.

There are still plenty of C++ jobs available.

My thoughts as well. And it's not like we're talking about taking random people off the street and teaching them to program, it's just a UI framework. And the stuff people are talking about in here isn't IDEs or CAD suites, it's like... the calculator app and the start menu. What kind of devs is MSFT hiring and paying $200k a year that can't learn a UI framework?

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs

Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.

In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.

Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.

Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers

Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).

Excuses, a $4 trillion valued company can surely afford some training on the technology it owns.

The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.

WinUI 3 was pretty decent even back in 2021, and much easier to learn than the clusterfuck of Android SDK.

This is directionally not totally off-base, but:

> it's hard to hire native UI developers

This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.

Yup, coming from iOS and Android, I learned most of WinUI in two weeks, even before LLMs. GUI frameworks are largely similar, so there’s no real justification for reimplementing single-platform applications with HTML.

web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))

Linux? You mean the C nest? KDE and QT (the default serious framework) with C++?

You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.

The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.

I am sure Microsoft, with its bags of money, can afford good C++ developers.

The question is then do good C++ developers want to go work at Microsoft? With its mandatory use of AI and desire to rewrite everything in Rust?

And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.

I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.

If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows

I wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it...

Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...

This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.

I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.

Gentoo-by-obscurity?

That's exactly how I think of it. Gentoo plus ABI obfuscation.

I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...

I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha.

And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)

https://dmitry.gr/89

you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.

(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)

Derive is more sophisticated. TI-89/92/Nspire is close though.

Derive doesn’t run on my iPhone sadly

Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.

That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it.

no 82. I only liked the ti-89

Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.

Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.

Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.

I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.

I'm betting a very large loading time.

I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.

I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.

I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.

Bit of a clickbaity way of phrasing it, but I'm also curious what the result was? From googling it I don't see any stories about recent changes to the calculator app, other than a few features like graphing.

I just tried it on regular Windows 11 Pro and it just opened the calculator.

I bet the friend just pressed the Windows key, and typing "Calc" and quickly pressing enter caused Bing to search for calc instead. Common failure because window's start-menu search/load/discovery is a total mess.

Even in this case it opens the calculator. Web search results are further down.

if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.

on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.

Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.

once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?

I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.

I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.

pretty weird, i have a few moderately high-end pc's and cheap laptops and they all have the same issues. Maybe me disabling a bunch of telemetry stuff screws up the caching.

I don't think caching makes the difference for me. I never search for "downloads" so it shouldn't be cached. Calculator probably was cached.

I'm sorry, I wasn't intentionally trying to write clickbait, I was just agreeing with the parent and did not consider how it would come off to other parties.

What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.

The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.

No worries! Sorry, I phrased that rudely / like an accusation.

That makes sense though. Yeah, it is really depressing. I guess they just don't prioritize start time at all. The hilarious part is, like... Blender on my computer starts up almost instantly! Versus a calculator...

If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.

The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.

I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.

It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".

Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.

It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.

I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.

The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.

I remember reading that even the Start menu is now a React app.

React Native*

Apparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.

Regardless, at least a few of my colleagues using Windows have reported issues with the new start menu. It seems very slow, and sometimes you have to close & reopen it for content to appear.

Searching for things via the Start menu is also totally hit or miss, on 5 different PCs that I regularly use, especially trying to open "Add or Remove Programs" (as described in an earlier comment).

Oh completely agreed on the start menu being slower.

I don’t use it anymore. Fortunately since my windows usage is restricted only to work and I have an ultra wide monitor, I’m able to pin all the apps I need on the taskbar. With the Win + # shortcuts I can avoid the start menu completely.

In the past I didn’t use the taskbar at all and depended on Win + search entirely.

What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?

New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.

There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.

I see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines.

Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.

I think I had to disable spellcheck to fix the ignored keystrokes, it happened even after disabling formatting

ahh, it might have been spellcheck then. I turned off all that stuff. In the heat of the moment, maybe I was a bit too angry to do proper root cause analysis :P

I've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.

Yes, some nice to have features were added, but it’s a text editing app, and not a good one at that, so it shouldn’t be crashing like that.

This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!

And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.

Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.

So, you're just screwed if you need a working editor in safe mode now?

This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"

Use MetaPad - like Notepad.

https://liquidninja.com/metapad/

I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++

Wasn't Wordpad the rich text editor on Windows?

But Notepad is not web based? It's still a native app but now uses UWP instead.

UWP, one of the 10+ frameworks used to run Windows 11's system components. Wonderful! Exemplary!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

Those are design languages/styles, not frameworks. There is a fewer number of frameworks but it's still a handful. Win32, WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc... but at least they're fairly consistent at using UWP for system UI, with older bits using Win32 still.

Which is exactly the problem, and isn't UWP, rather WinUI/WinAppSDK, the WinRT version on top of Win32, instead of UWP.

UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com