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Comment by steviey19 | Hacker News Reader

Buried in this announcement about Windows 11 improvements is a fascinating admission: the Windows 11 Start menu has been built using React this entire time. Microsoft is now migrating it to their native WinUI3 framework to improve performance and reduce interaction latency.

This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.

The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.

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It's been known for a while - at least 2024 - that its react.

Yeah, I know about that and I'm a Mac / Linux guy.

It has not been built with React, the article is false and it's a typical statement meant to make you outraged. The "recommended" section in the start menu was built using React Native and renders into XAML, so as natve as it can get. WinUI changes nothing about this. It's very tiresome having to constantly debunk this because "journalists" are chasing cheap clicks instead of doing their job.

Do you have a source for that?

Here from a React conference for example: https://x.com/zeko369/status/1791141890106290670 or do a search for more: https://www.google.com/search?q=react+native+start+menu+reco...

XAML I would not consider native; it's an XML-infested .NET-originated monstrosity. Win32 is native.

Still way better than dealing with div soup turned into UI via magic CSS incantations.

And the CSS grid system was based on XAML grid.

Mostly because the C++/WinRT tooling is non existent, after killing the C++/CX Visual Studio XAML integration, C++ Builder like, thus most C++ teams reach out to React Native instead, as Microsoft's QML.

Same happened to the XBox dashboard.

No, it was built using WinUI2/UWP XAML. But one section ("Recommended") uses React Native (which on Windows is built on top of WinUI2/UWP XAML)

Did the headline get updated since this comment? At the time of writing this reply, the headlines is “windows 11’s start menu was built using React …”, which I agree is super interesting.

Its in the headline here, its buried in the article.

Its seems a very strange decision to write it in React in the first place.

Windows 11 sounds terrible. Flicker in the file manager? How does that happen?

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