21–30 of 308 posts
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).
I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?
Seasons may come and go, but one thing will never change. Windows and an absolutely baffling array of UI frameworks with various pitfalls, uncertain futures, and no clear winners. (honorable mention to WinForms though.)
A framework that has just one show-stopper missing feature or problem is... unusable. You can't embark on a large, complex application development journey if you even suspect that you'll be painted into a corner.
For example, many of WPF-derived frameworks had atrocious performance, with fundamental mistakes in their design that made them incompatible with list virtualization. It wasn't until they had to eat their own dogfood and use WPF for Visual Studio that they started fixing these issues.
Win UI 3 meanwhile dropped all support for HDR, wide-gamut, etc... going backwards to SDR sRGB only in an era where all mobile phone manufacturers were starting to standardise on OLED HDR displays. The logic behind this decision? Microsoft wanted a UI framework that is "mobile compatible"!
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).
The news being discussed is not about explorer being open sourced.
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).
I won’t benefit from this. At the same time, I cannot see a single bad thing about it, so I’m surprised about all the negative energy.
It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF.
People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
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).
Is the Windows team even using WinUI for the native Win11 desktop UI? ;)
Or a 2 row taskbar?
So I can easily switch between my 40 windows open? What is good for productivity?
I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?
MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent.
WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3.
Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls and tools, I don’t trust the longevity.