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Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

windowslatest.com

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Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#31

Post by miellaby »

vrighter wrote: post #22
dangus wrote: post #2

People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places? Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now. Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration." It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.

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Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#35

Post by miellaby »

dangus wrote: post #2

People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places? Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now. Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

The keyword you missed is 'idle'. An app should use as much Ram as needed to cache computation and network as it runs. But it shouldn't do when in the background. The Ram used here is not for accelerating the user experience. It's for the internal functioning of the managed language (Javascript) and virtual machine (Dom and browser API) because it has been packaged as a full Chrome clone running a single web app.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#38

Post by happymellon »

rock_artist wrote: post #18

I use WhatsApp web and avoided the apps on desktop. Yet, I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here (which is a basic wrapper) There are no calls in the web app, but modern web stack is more than enough to provide all the real functionality needed for it.

Indeed, the desktop app provides absolutely nothing.

If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop, that could be useful but obviously that can't be a feature they therefore offer.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#39

Post by ZeroConcerns »

Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is!

You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.

But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...

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