Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #248

jack_tripper wrote: post #188

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> Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade What a wrong and misleading statement. Not they aren't. Otherwise Winamp 2.95 from 2003 wouldn't flawlessly work on my Windows 11 install 23 years later. Same with my Unreal Tournament 99 installation that I just copied over via a CD left from my Windows 98 PC. As long as you haven't used any undocumented APIs or made your app hac…

While the old APIs keep working, Microsoft does like to come up with completely new APIs every five years or so. If you want to do basic UI on Windows today, you can use: - Win32 UI - MFC - .NET WinForms - WinFX - .NET WPF - WinRT - UWP And I'm sure there are many others that I'm forgetting.

Post by sirwhinesalot » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #319

simoncion wrote: post #299

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> Win32 doesn't even support dark mode properly because it's effectively "deprecated" like all the others in the graveyard. Remember when you used to be able to make custom Windows color schemes? Where you could color each widget type independently? I miss that. Assuming that your report is true, if Microsoft gave a shit, they'd come up with four color schemes (high-contrast light/dark mode and regular-contrast light…

Come to the KDE dark side... there's no mandatory cookies and recolorable widgets

Post by skydhash » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

jagged-chisel wrote: post #198

72deluxe wrote: post #190

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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.”

Post by skydhash » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

savolai wrote: post #305

72deluxe wrote: post #243

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That's not what the issue here is. The issue is not that a native Windows app needs to run in a browser. The issue is that a native Windows app has been replaced by yet another browser.

Yes. Arguably because of the organisational cost of maintaining both a web version (which they arguably need) and a native windows version (which they arguably don’t need).

Post by rangestransform » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

pragmatic wrote: post #303

pjc50 wrote: post #232

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> So you're saying that it is impossible for a large company to somehow use native toolkits to draw text bubbles and emojis?? One weird thing about software development is that there are plenty of things which motivated individual developers can achieve which large companies can't even write the requirements for, let alone achieve.

Hacker News just recreated startups from first principles! /s But seriously folks, this is why there will always be room for startups. Megacorps are slow lumbering beats that suffer from entropy and signal loss at every edge on the graph. The example here is that some marketing function gets the signal from Zuck to put Lego duplo characters everywhere because metaverse. Of course 90% of the company knows its dead on…