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Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

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Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#251

Post by variadix »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

This is ridiculous. The real explanation is a level of uncaring incompetence that can only be sustained in large organizations.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#252

Post by [deleted] »

fhennig wrote: post #202
baq wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you kinda answered yourself and perhaps suggested the answer, but it's worth saying out loud: they don't want whatsapp to be a chat app. they want it to be the next facebook and they want to smuggle it in a chat app container. if it seems like if it starts working out, I'll be buying Meta stock with disgust.

Why buy stock of something you don't like? Surely you can find other profitable investment options that also then don't support the thing you don't like?

[deleted]

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#253

Post by SJC_Hacker »

vintagedave wrote: post #240
iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

> The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms. Why not use a common library, where platform teams can update what features they use from it at their own pace? Or why not use some other tech that allows multi-platform native shipping? The company I just started at, Re…

Separating the UI from the functionality is not as easy as it sounds. Often the first iteration of a program has the business logic tightly coupled to the UI, and is designed for a single platform. You need engineers with foresight to refactor before it becomes a mess

Also even the non UI is not trivial. I once worked on a very la4ge code base that was console only. We en we eventually gave up on our Windows and Mac ports. Granted it was C++ …

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#254

Post by happymellon »

phonon wrote: post #43
happymellon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the desktop app provides absolutely nothing. If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop, that could be useful but obviously that can't be a feature they therefore offer.

> If it allowed me to do video calls from a laptop It does though? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FkkHyvw8M

Sorry I should have been clearer.

According to this not any more.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#255

Post by onion2k »

It probably isn't really using that much but it will have reserved that much. V8 reserves memory in chunks of 256MB using virtualalloc with MEM_RESERVE on Windows (I think). It has to do that for each isolated process where an isolate is a tab, webview, worker, etc. A page that's built up from 4 isolated processes will reserve 1GB of RAM. That's only virtual alloc though, so other OS processes can take the memory if they really need it.

There is essentially no way to tell if a JS app is using a lot of memory just by looking at what the process has reserved. There's loads of things that end up in that space - cached pages, cached compiled code, cached bitmaps of rendered pages, etc.

The task monitor tells you what Chrome or Chromium (e.g. Electron) is doing, not what the web app is doing.

There is a good argument to suggest Chromium is hogging more than it should. That's not really WhatsApp's fault though.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#256

Post by cudgy »

andsoitis wrote: post #233
fhennig wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why buy stock of something you don't like? Surely you can find other profitable investment options that also then don't support the thing you don't like?

Buying shares in a company supports the company financially only in very limited contexts (e.g. IPO). Buying shares primarily benefits you as an investor. Buying shares in a company doesn’t benefit its operations, like making a product, directly. Hence, buying shares != support company’s products, however counterintuitive that feels.

“Buying shares primarily benefits you as an investor.”

Maybe during a never-ending bull market … but all bull markets end … look at the “lost decade”

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#257

Post by iamcalledrob »

vintagedave wrote: post #240
iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As 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…

> The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms. Why not use a common library, where platform teams can update what features they use from it at their own pace? Or why not use some other tech that allows multi-platform native shipping? The company I just started at, Re…

Personally I think the challenges with this approach (having literally used a Go shared library + native UI myself): 1. The web still exists. You can't practically use a Go shared library on the web. And you probably don't want your shared library written in JS. 2. In my experience, most of the coordination is about the UI, not the underlying implementation. So the human cost isn't reduced much with shared libraries. 3. At a big company, "feature teams" can't easily ship native desktop UI because feature team eng only knows web...

I do think this approach is super viable with a product development approach that is more waterfall, however. Where a team owns the platform and it's design.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#259

Post by cyanydeez »

72deluxe wrote: post #207
jagged-chisel wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

I too did not know anything about Horde3D when I found it and incorporated it.

Once you have MBAs, they don't want you wasting their 6-month bonus

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#260

Post by rpgbr »

shevy-java wrote: post #128

Software engineering really took a dive in the last 10 years. For instance, KDE has a daemon that asks for donations, added by Nate "I am the king of KDE". Granted, the daemon is mostly pointless in general and not causing much issues (people are typically only bothered by it once then you can silence it), but just the time people invest here to harass others or add unnecessary software on other computers shows how t…

KDE is in a better shape than anything on its past. Whatever you feel about Nate, he cares — and that's a huge, almost unique quality today. Also, the nagging to donate doesn't bother at all — and has had a positive impact in increasing donations do KDE project.
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