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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#161

Post by n8cpdx »

mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> WPF was good As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree. In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something…

It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option).

But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.

I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?

FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#162

Post by randomfool »

jeswin wrote: post #152

Microsoft's biggest mistake was .Net being a Java competitor when it should have just been like golang producing native binaries. Especially since .Net was realistically only going to succeed on x86/64 at that point (late 90s and 2000s). This shut the door on C# for consumer UIs, and people stuck to Visual Basic and MFC. It took them more than 2 decades to finally support pure native binaries (via NativeAOT). And it'…

They were recovering from all of the security fiascos of software that wasn’t being updated. So they pushed as much as they could into the core libraries and forced only one version to be installed at a time- so they could easily push security fixes.

This led to one of the trickiest things for early .NET consumer apps- getting the latest runtime installed.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#163

Post by sharts »

This will never change. All large orgs are this way because at the end of the day, unless its preventing them from making profits, there is no incentive to change it.

Moreover, there isn’t much in the way of alternatives. Everyone likes to hate on MS —for decades this has happened and nothing came of it.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#164

Post by runjake »

bombcar wrote: post #160
rincebrain wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.

Minor correction: Apple introduced GPU-accelerated GUI in 10.2 with the introduction of Quartz Extreme.

Display PostScript did not have GPU acceleration, as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor?#Quartz_Extr...

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#165

Post by jemmyw »

skydhash wrote: post #80
jemmyw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get hung up on this native vs web thing. But when it comes down to it, it's just one renderer or another unless you're actually drawing the controls yourself pixel by pixel. The sticking point is following the system style / theme. But all the popular desktop OSs seem to have deviated on this so much themselves I'm not sure how important this is.

The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.

> The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features

Can you expand on this, because I'm not seeing it myself. The DOM, html+css is very flexible. It easily encompasses most UI. Most UI is some kind of data display, so lists, trees, tables, forms.

The need for JS might be what you're complaining about. I think we might be stuck with it as a UI control language forever.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#166

Post by randomfool »

int_19h wrote: post #88
markus_zhang wrote: post #5

Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic: https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542

It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off. I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent o…

Sinofsky kept talking about how many devs were making apps in JavaScript and how they would just be at home in Win8. This was before React, ES5 (no native classes! or promises!), etc- jQuery was still very popular and SPAs were extremely rare. He completely overlooked how dependent many of these devs were on their servers- Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#167

Post by dataflow »

WPF was atrocious from the beginning and Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by not basing everything in Windows on it.

Every WPF program was laggy and took ages to even start up (is everyone forgetting hard disk speeds?), partly due to it being managed code. The components didn't feel native either, and the coupling to managed code and garbage collection basically ensured all those would be perpetual issues. Yeah the programming model was beautiful and all, but you're supposedly developing to make your customers happy, not to make yourself or computer scientists happy.

You can see how terrible it would've been to base Windows's shell on WPF by looking at how much users have loved the non-Win32 windows since then.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#169

Post by seltzered_ »

mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> WPF was good As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree. In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something…

A notable example I remember from around 2010 was when Evernote dropped WPF, supposedly due to blurry text issues but probably also performance (remember when we called it EverBloat?)

Can't find the original blog post about it but here's a couple mentions of it:

- https://www.edandersen.com/p/evernote-has-no-patience-drops-...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/x0nu7h/comment/im9k...

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#170

Post by bigstrat2003 »

garganzol wrote: post #110

The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…

> sufficiently performant

In no universe is HTML performant compared to actual desktop applications. It sucks big time.

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