Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#181

Post by jopsen » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

sircastor wrote: post #110

xvilka wrote: post #20

Maybe one day they will discover Qt framework too.

A few years back my company put out reqs for Qt devs because we were pushing hard to do some POCs with Qt frameworks. We had a hard time finding those people. I don’t know if it was location or compensation or what.

Unless you need to make a really complicated UI, do you really need Qt devs?

I did a custom widget for editing petri-nets in Qt (no QML), you just need competent devs, whether you have Qt, GTK, or winforms experience doesn't matter.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#182

Post by Matthias247 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

billti wrote: post #168

The article says Electron is a memory hog because it is based on Chromium, but so is WebView2! As it is based on the new Chromium version of Edge. It’s still not clear how the switch results in half the memory use then (though I’m happy to see it!)

It might have the savings on by windows which already loads Edge for other purposes

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#183

Post by slumdev » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

turbinerneiter wrote: post #162

slumdev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Our company (we'll call it Monsarno) was bought by a certain German aspirin company, and our Bavarian overlords are slowly forcing us from Slack over to Teams. It's a nightmare, and very few groups have made the transition willingly.

Bayer isn't Bavarian, it's Northrine Westphalian.

I guess there'll be some more required CBTs about the company's history and naming, then.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#184

Post by wila » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #151

Does WebView2 expose an API to add primitives directly to the JavaScript interpreter, or must you do everything by sending JSON messages?

You can send javascript directly to the WebView2 control [1].

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we...

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#185

Post by jordemort » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

As far as I can tell, WebView2 only runs on Windows right now; the current version of Teams runs on Mac and Linux as well, though. I wonder if that means WebView2 will also be coming to those platforms, or if it'll remain an Electron app on those platforms, or if they're just dropping support for those platforms entirely.

This could also have interesting implications for VS Code. I wonder if Electron has a future at all, or if it's going to go the way of Atom, which was another thing MS picked up from GitHub and then walked away from in favor of a quackalike with a stronger Microsoft pedigree.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#186

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

pivo wrote: post #98

ceejayoz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to include formatting.

You can change it, modify the key mapping like so: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...

Neat, thanks!

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#187

Post by jl6 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

On the offchance that someone from Microsoft is reading, I’ll take this opportunity to again express my disbelief that it’s impossible to print a chat or export it in any way from Teams. Even copy & paste is broken if you try to get more than a screenful.

Here is why this functionality is important:

* When a colleague leaves the organisation, you can’t search for a chat with them any more, so the chats are effectively lost.

* When people chat in a meeting, that meeting becomes the only place the chat exists, and do you really want to have to keep years worth of old meeting items in your calendar just to avoid losing that chat? And how are you supposed to organize calendar items as a store of conversations anyway?

* Its the most basic level of interoperability. How can you take a product seriously when it traps your data like this?

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#188

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

drclau wrote: post #62

darksaints wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is about as ideal as you can get for cross platform apps. Unfortunately the licensing is an impediment for a lot of usecases.

So, Microsoft should buy Qt then.

Or something like it, maybe something already running on .net ...

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#189

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #24

richardstephens wrote: post #7

Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat industry that everyone's converged on Electron? You'd think Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it seems like my only option is IRC.

> If I want a chat service with native apps But why? 'Native' is a tool, not a goal, surely? What's the underlying goal you want to achieve, and do you really need native to achieve that?

> "What's the underlying goal you want to achieve"

Responds to user input quickly enough to not be frustrating.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#190

Post by mmis1000 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #177

dafelst wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then with native you have to pay the cross platform price. Which is higher do you think? With Electron you get cross platform more or less for free and ostensibly you can make it faster later. Don't get me wrong, I love doing native work, but as someone who has to deal with cross-platform issues in native applications (well games) on the daily, I can tell you that even with massive code reuse and good interfaces,…

I mean, you are talking about making a goddamn text editor faster — it’s just ridiculous. There should be no lag whatsoever when it comes to UIs in 2021.

Building a text editor across platform with exact the same behavior is somewhat a thing that you almost always to redo "everything" in different platforms.

It isn't very unseasonable to just relies on something that already do most hard works for you.

If you must use some "native" alternative. It is probably something like GTK/QT. But I doubt do they actually have the ability to do such complex edit behavior and layouts.