Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.
Anyone remembers Active Desktop?
Windows still has Active Desktop, doesn't it?
Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
191–200 of 402 posts
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
If is anything like the WhatsApp Web, "works" might be optimistic choice of word. When I switched from Windows, the thing that I missed from Windows on Linux was the native WhatsApp App. Now they killed there, so feeling better on my switch now!
The WhatsApp web app is not perfect (no software is) but I’ve never had any major issues with it. It’s snappy and very rarely does it glitch out. I find your comment surprising.
It's a ram hog if you stay the tab open for a while, with ton of messages. So from time to time I need to close the tab and open again.
Huge perf issues because of this.
Also had some serious bugs for a few week. Had to let WhatsApp Web wait for completely sync for 15 minutes~ or else it just stop responding and crashes everything.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#193Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the…
> The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them. What are you talking about? The Windows APIs have been stable for at least 20 years.
I think few people are using the Win32 APIs directly and Microsoft has been shifting their stuff a bunch.
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation ) had been the recommendation a while back, but then Microsoft started pushing UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Both of those have been succeeded by WinUI 3. UWP has been deprecated. WPF is alive, but more in a maintenance mode while WinUI 3 takes over the future. Oh, and WinForms were popular, but now not.
There's definitely been a lot of shifting and I think that's caused a lot of annoyance in the developer community - especially as Microsoft ships JS/WebView2 based apps instead of dogfooding their own stuff. If you hang out in the dotnet subreddit enough, you'll definitely see Windows devs annoyed at Microsoft's mercurial attitude toward their desktop frameworks and seeming lack of direction/interest - as their big new things are JS/WebView2.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#195As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and exp…
I am baffled by this. I wrote a cross-platform GUI for an audio signal processor in wxWidgets that rendered all of its own widgets (own Draw calls, for faders, graphic EQ, compressors, drag/drop linking of nodes for a layout, knobs, meters/scopes) and incorporated Horde3D as a 3D rendering of the arena. It ran on macOS and Windows. Another chap handled the network control code that included joining multicast groups t…
nobody they hire knows how to do anything that isn't react anymore.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I kinda agree with that reluctantly. As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web. So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste. I think we’re not f…
Do you think most people have 128GB laptop? It’s more likely to be 8 or 16 GB. The OS os likely taking 4 or more, the browser two or more. And if you add any office applications, that’s another few GB gone. Then how many Electron monstrosities you think the user can add on top of that?
Some PM: users are locked in to our ecosystem; they can't load other apps after ours! /s
But for real, the average number of apps people downloading get fewer year over year. When the most popular/essential apps take up more RAM, this effect will only exacerbate. RAM prices have also doubled over the last 3 months and I expect this to hold true for a couple more years.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.
This is wrong. The "recommended" section of the start menu is written with React Native but compiled to native XAML and not running web technologies. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217
Is that's why on a system where I removed widgets and web search results windows keeps msedgewebview2 active?
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#198As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and exp…
I am baffled by this. I wrote a cross-platform GUI for an audio signal processor in wxWidgets that rendered all of its own widgets (own Draw calls, for faders, graphic EQ, compressors, drag/drop linking of nodes for a layout, knobs, meters/scopes) and incorporated Horde3D as a 3D rendering of the arena. It ran on macOS and Windows. Another chap handled the network control code that included joining multicast groups t…
If they want fungible engineers, yes. They don’t want to pay extra for an expert in wxWidgets and Horde3D. They don’t want to wait while that expert’s replacement comes up to speed on Horde3D. They don’t even want to wait for any existing engineers to learn these two technologies.
They know web, they can manage web - web is “less risky.”
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#199Out of curiosity, Does anyone know where exactly does the bloat of the electron come from in terms of ram usage, compared to a "native toolkit"? Because just parsing html/xml/some declarative ui description to create a scenegraph and pushing it to the GPU is something I'm sure even native frameworks like Qt do. Yet I can feel the latency in vs code vs. say sublime text. It's tempting to blame the huge js blobs trying…
It’s the extra API and layout rules. A lot of UI toolkit supports some version of xml for declarative UI programming. And they will create a widget tree to match it. But they’re far simpler than the DOM and therefore faster. Also think all the web subsystem that has been added over they years. Every electron app is bundling those in, even the inspector. It’s shipping a whole VM with your code. Containers have at leas…
Yep. Chrome contains:
- HTML rendering - which is insanely complex to do efficiently for arbitrary web apps.
- Video conferencing software
- A graphics engine. Used for rendering web content, canvas2d, webgl, webgpu and video encoding & decoding for a bunch of formats. It also has a bunch of backends (eg CPU, Metal, Vulcan, etc)
- JS, and every feature ever added to JS.
- WASM compiler, optimizer & runtime
- Memory manager, process isolation per tab, and all the plumbing to make that work.
- The Inspector - which contains a debugger and most of an IDE for JS, WASM, CSS and HTML.
- So much interop. Like chromecast support, http1, http2, quic, websockets, webtransport, webrtc, javascript remote debugger protocol, support for lots of pre-unicode text formats, DoH, webdriver, and on and on.
- Extension support
- Gamepad drivers, web bluetooth, webserial, midi support
What am I missing? Probably lots of stuff. I have no idea how much each of these components contributes to browser bloat. But all up? Its a lot. Chrome is bigger than most complete operating systems from a decade or two ago. Browser vendors have to pick between fast, simple and fully featured. Chrome sacrifices simplicity every time.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#200> You’d realise how bad this is when I tell you the benchmarks for the native WhatsApp for comparison. I tested the old/native WhatsApp, and it uses just 190MB most of the time, dropping to less than 100MB when it’s completely idle. At worst, it would reach 300MB, which can happen only when the chat is really active. Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are t…
I think Zoom is like that too and uses some obscure chinese GUI library.