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

#311

Post by mindri0t » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #191

kaba0 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a bit? But as others wrote, they have 50 people. How many does Microsoft have (and of course, Google, Facebook are also bad at it)

Microsoft has 160,000. Don't get me wrong, I loathe Teams and its laggish bullshit nature as much as the rest of the pitchfork wielding people in this thread, it's just that it's not apples-to-apples comparison with a pure chat/call client and the headcount needed to develop it because of how much extra junk is hiding in Teams.

I agree with your point however it just goes to reinforce that part of the failure of teams is that it kind of does a lot of things but it does all those things really badly. If they had some notion of a product vision, some focus, some opinions and executed on those with a users first attitude then it might not be in such a sorry state and it would probably be a whole lot easier to deliver great native experiences. IMHO a big part of the problem is this idea of just throwing features at applications without designing an actual product that seems to be extremely popular but always dreadful. Do less and deliver excellence, don’t do everything half arsed and throw more adverts at the resulting problem.

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

#312

Post by rauchp » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

failwhaleshark wrote: post #128

tluyben2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we moved away because MS themselves are simply not serious about it.

Cross-platform development is like communism. An unattainable utopia. There's no "magicking-away" the idiosyncrasies of cross-platform development with abstraction layers. It's simpler to use native tools and go for the best each platform has to offer while keeping the L&F UX as similar as possible.

React Native and (arguably) Flutter are going through a golden age right now. Major companies like Tesla, Coinbase, and Shopify have adopted them, and the developer experience has never been better. I'm not sure why it worked now, but didn't work for Xamarin / Ionic, though.

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

#313

Post by failwhaleshark » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #300

failwhaleshark wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When and where it's a priority: creating a solid user-experience takes effort. If a project can't manage that when it matters, then their product or service is also going to suck in so many other ways their users will notice. Then native or not, it won't matter when everyone hates them. Mac and iOS are relatively-straightforward, aren't terribly different, and share development resources. Android (Kotlin) doesn't oft…

> To mostly front-end developers who don't know much about the world outside of a browser. Just for the record I'm a senior backend developer, who sometimes operates at CTO level in startups, and I suck at front-end development. But still electron makes sense to me. Or react native if it's mobile only. The state of cross platform development is pretty bad.

It wasn't directed personally. The tendency is for front-end developers (the bulk of developers numerically) to treat software development like RMS does with emacs: everything extends from their perspective without consideration of perspectives or paradigms beyond their own. Embedded, native, real-time/mission-critical/fault-tolerance, resource-constrained, widely-compatible, ASIC/FPGA, and/or production-/shipping-scalable.

Cross-platform development will never be improved by N-times duplicated effort of abstraction layers on-top. The best that could happen is for OS developers to agree on common interfaces like UNIX/The Open Group for low-level operations, but for high-level media, UI, and common native development APIs more integrated than a patchwork of libraries like Qt, LibUV, etc.

I've worked on nuclear reactor simulators in F95, embedded industrial GPS equipment, deadline-oriented ad server meta-mediation, Fortune 500 client-facing consulting, compilers, functional programming projects, and now earn a paycheck doing SRE/PE since it's easy money to fund side-hustles.

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

#314

Post by kaba0 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #204

kaba0 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that connecting the 4 buttons of functionality in 5 frameworks is all that much work, when the bulk of the work is backend. Also, it is a trivially scalable problem, where you can just throw 5x as many people at it. I get the popularity of electron and other cross-platform tools for small startups, but for Microsoft..

> Also, it is a trivially scalable problem, where you can just throw 5x as many people at it. Having done exactly this work it's really not as simple as throwing 5x as many people at it. Though to be clear, I am an advocate of native apps on each platform and am not a fan of "wrap a webview around it" type fake-apps. That said, we need to be honest about level of complexity here. The problem with maintaining 5x nativ…

Thanks for this POW!

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

#315

Post by anoncake » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #211

anoncake wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft easily has the resources to write 5 chat app UIs.

That's a hopelessly simplisitc way of looking at the situation. Every team at Microsoft has different levels of resources, and some would rather spend those resources improving their product rather than writing and maintaining 5 different versions of the frontend part of their product. That's typically the smart choice.

I really don't care about Microsoft's internal organization or what team has how many resources right now.

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

#316

Post by olliej » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

slashdev wrote: post #29

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.

Native apps means essentially building at least 5 distinct apps: windows, mac, iOS, linux, android. What a mess to work with and maintain. We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers and they're very advanced and reasonably pleasant to work with these days. If you bundle the browser (electron) then you don't have to worry about differences between browsers. So electron makes plenty of sense to developer…

Electron fails to support even the most basic Mac behaviours, every electron app is immediately recognizable and frustrating.

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

#317

Post by adzm » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

wila wrote: post #195

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's because they control the whole stack. FWIW, I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed. To give you a basic idea. I'm running the control embedded and the WebView2 control consumes about 60MB after navigating to my own -mostly text- website. Browsing within that control to the page of the…

> I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed.

To what extent are you maintaining compatibility? The old mshtml provides com bindings for pretty much everything. I'd be interested to see what you have if you end up releasing the code. I would love for the old Trident / mshtml / edgehtml engines to be made open.

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

#318

Post by Someone » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

ljm wrote: post #306

Someone wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History. The Mac didn’t have “paste without formatting”, and assigned ⌘-V to “paste with formatting”. Even if it had, they might have made it the default, either to show of that styles copied over, or for consistency. If you paste a picture, you don’t lose formatting, either (of the picture, whatever that means, or any text in the image) If you copied some text in MacWrite, for example, exited MacWrote, launched MacP…

Last time I built something on MacOS, this was basically just a feature of the clipboard API that each app could use independently. When copying to the clipboard, you could declare numerous formats for what was copied, and any app receiving clipboard input could state that they only accepted one format. e.g. copy a jpeg file and you can paste it into Slack, and it will automatically add the image to the post. Paste i…

That has been around on the Mac since 1984 and applications were always encouraged to put plain text on the clipboard alongside formatted text, but we’re talking UI here, not technology. This kind of UI allows you to choose which of these you want because it turns out the application cannot always make the best choice.

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

#319

Post by pseudalopex » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #298

formerly_proven wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the alternative? Be only on one platform? Not viable today. Implement 5 different apps, usually not viable. Why are we pretending in this thread that there aren't any cross-platform toolkits? Using that is an entirely valid trade-off between "putting a webshit in its window" and "you have to develop 10 separate native apps".

Are you talking Qt? Xamarin? Those are pretty sucky by comparison to both web and native and they don't feel native. The problem is not that cross platform toolkits don't exist, it's that they're aren't any good enough. Also why are we pretending in this thread that it's impossible to write electron or web apps with more reasonable memory usage? Look at vscode. Electron, as much as I hate to say it, is one of the bes…

The Qt apps I use are much better than the Electron apps I use.

It must be very hard to write Electron apps with more reasonable memory usage if VS Code is the sole example anyone ever has.

Sublime Text is my reference for reasonable memory usage and performance. VS Code doesn't measure up.

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

#320

Post by bigbob2 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #292

eloff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad to me that Xamarin doesn't get more love and adoption.

My SO just finished a term project that used Xamarin.Forms. Conceptually the framework is perfect then you actually use it and want to off yourself. MAUI, if taken seriously and isn't only a rebrand, could be quite an accomplishment and a great tool.

I'm not sure about the state of Xamarin Forms these days, but back when I worked with it a few years ago even the sample apps had memory leaks on iOS. I agree that conceptually it was amazing, as was Xamarin itself. If Forms doesn't have leaks these days it would definitely be a great way to build cross-platform apps.