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knorker

> like all web apps, it’s slow

No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:

1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.

2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.

I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.

This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant.

Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.

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Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.

That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.

> Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.

That's not an inherent web-vs-native difference, though.

> That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner

That's a choice.

> which means that they'll always have a speed advantage

woah there. No.

> assuming your typical dev team

So it comes down to the developers (and project management, etc). Yup, I 100% agree with that.

So we agree that it's not a technical difference?

Another way to say tenth of a second is 100,000,000 nanoseconds.

We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?

Edit: Corrected the scale factor.

Another way (which happens to be correct) to say tenth of a second is 100 000 000 (one hundred million) nanoseconds. You were off by a factor of 1000!

Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.

Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.

That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!

All web apps are in fact slow compared to native apps. They are also clunky (though that's my opinion, not a fact). There are better and worse web apps, yes. And it's possible to make native apps which are even worse than a web app. But "like all web apps, it's slow" is a perfectly fair statement.

That's not even remotely true.

What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?

Most top of mind was this tragedy that Microsoft somehow thinks is "good" and not something to be ashamed of at all: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialo...

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