Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?
Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
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Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#12Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?
Developers trying to justify their employment and pad their resumes.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#13How does this happen? How do you build a fundamental OS control in react?
This is what I'm wondering. How dysfunctional is microsoft that they shipped a react-based start menu? It reads like satire, "Windows 11 is so bad that even microsoft doesn't use native controls".
MS also made one of the most hated IM and audiovisual meeting applications with web tech, replacing a previously (not great but much better) native one: Teams.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#14Buried 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 intere…
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.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#15Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#16Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?
My best guess is ads.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#17It's not React. A small part (recommended apps) was built using React Native for Windows, which is not React Native but an offshoot that uses native Windows APIs.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#18Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?
Developers trying to justify their employment and pad their resumes.
Come on. Are you an employed developer? If so, even if you have that much power over the flagship product of the company, that you can use it to pad your résumé, do you think the same happens at Microsoft? By all means, the bugs may speak of skill issues (or may not: there's also crunching, mandated AI... Who knows), but the Cloud-first, push-ads, force-account etc. enshittification is the implementation of a vision I doubt was collectively composed by devs, let alone a single dev.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#19People stop believing in anything related to WinUI coming from Microsoft marketing machine.
Besides examples like this one.
The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.
Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.
C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.
Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.
Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.
Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.
Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...
EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.
Re: Windows 11's Start menu was built using React – now switching to native WinUI
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers trying to justify their employment and pad their resumes.
Come on. Are you an employed developer? If so, even if you have that much power over the flagship product of the company, that you can use it to pad your résumé, do you think the same happens at Microsoft? By all means, the bugs may speak of skill issues (or may not: there's also crunching, mandated AI... Who knows), but the Cloud-first, push-ads, force-account etc. enshittification is the implementation of a vision…
The ads pushing would be just as possible with a fully native start menu.
Using React for it was probably done since it's just objectively easier and faster to tweak a React app than native components (see various folks complaining about WinUI).