121–130 of 418 posts
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Yeah, it is mostly laziness and cost cutting at the expense of users. Nowadays there isn't even an excuse anymore, just vibe code it away in native frameworks.
When I can modify my desktop/theme (KDE) with css I will happily start doing it since that sounds easy.
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Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.
Consistent like what? Like maybe a decade ago one could say that osx was consistent, but nowadays even SwiftUI and cocoa is visibly different, let alone every second app that uses electron. And people don't care. Windows has like 4 frameworks available on a bare new, latest OS install, just go deep enough in the "settings" or whatever they call it, and you can reach down to winforms. And on top the start menu is a re…
Do they render different looking buttons?
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Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.
A foolish consistency with terribly designed shallow superficial desktop user interfaces dreamed up by overpaid cocaine addled corporate boutique brand designers with not only no experience but actual burning contempt for usability and human factors and accessability and affordances is the hobgoblin of little minds. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
That doesn't say anything about the value of whatever UI kit is in place, being shared consistently by apps. A virtue that, apparent from this thread, is no longer universally shared.
> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will v…
Since when did anyone ever complain that youtube, google maps, roblox, or any other web sites didn't have native buttons and UI patterns? Are you implying that the Windows, Mac, and Linux native desktop user interfaces don't all totally suck??! Or that there wasn't a huge celebration when Alan Dye finally left Apple for Meta? Or that users are clamoring for Jony Ive's infamous shallow superficial visual elegance over…
> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will v…
Who cares if it looks native? Native UIs change all the time too and not always for the better.
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> look native to the OS Is that a problem? A button with a legible label is a button. The host OS doesn't have to look exactly like the applications it runs.
Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.
> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will v…
Every time I use Zed across Linux, macOS and Windows , I'm amazed stable and performant it's GPUI framework is. As a user, I'm very happy with it; of course some basic features like accessibility is missing but I'm sure it will be implemented soon. As a developer, I'm not sure what's the barrier for entry is apart from Rust then again it's the USP as well.
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> look native to the OS Is that a problem? A button with a legible label is a button. The host OS doesn't have to look exactly like the applications it runs.
Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.
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How is it a poor choice of words? It might not be "native" UI, but they never claimed as such. I've always felt that native UI on Linux always looks incredibly ugly and I'd much rather use a nicely styled HTML+CSS layout instead. In my experience, Electron mostly gets flak for being bloated and slow, it not being native is sometimes a secondary point people add on top. I've always wanted to build a direct-browser int…
I don't mind the idea of using HTML components and widgets to style desktop applications. CSS and the DOM are widely known and reusing those for desktop apps is probably a good idea. The problem, as you've pointed out, is that electron apps are bloated and slow. If they became the default and my editor, chat client, terminal, and everything else that I keep open were just thin layers around web applications, I'd rath…
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Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.
Within OS consistency is much less of thing a thing than Web design conventions. Windows by itself has had several different UI frameworks over the years, so different "native" Windows programs can look completely different from each other.
Sorry, are you saying that two random web apps will typically share more UI consistency than two random Windows apps? Because, although I'm not currently familiar with Windows, I would be amazed if that were true.