Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#331

Post by marcos100 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#332

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #268

noodletheworld wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks? There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing . It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft , calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it? I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like…

If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote? My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well. Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decisio…

> If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS

That is not how the decision making for cross-platform works. You choose those alternatives knowing that they are crap in many respects, yet accept the trade offs because you want to save money on dev hours.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#333

Post by rigonkulous » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.

I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers.

The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen.

For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser and all its responsibilities - but rather cross-platform, reliable, predictable on all platforms - i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.

This is attainable and there are many great examples of apps which are in fact, old wheels not re-invented, which still work for their particular user market.

I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.

The cognitive load of doing a web app that can do all the things a native app can do, is equivalent to the load required to build a cross-platform app using native frameworks, so ..

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#334

Post by zanderz » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #101

lenkite wrote: post #28

The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32. They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.

WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.

Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.

Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#335

Post by ShroudedNight » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

marcos100 wrote: post #331

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#336

Post by SyneRyder » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

rigonkulous wrote: post #330

My coherent GUI strategy: just use JUCE. Invested in it, shipped it, seen it solve the cross-platform problem beautifully. Can just write C++, and see it running everywhere. The JUCE GUI capabilities are more than adequate for many, many things. There are other platform-scaffolded cross-platform frameworks. JUCE is cromulantly FNORD.

That sounds intriguing - are there examples of desktop apps (eg productivity apps) that are made with JUCE?

I'm already very familiar with JUCE in VST plugins, I have hundreds of VSTs made with JUCE and I love their UIs. But I don't think I've ever seen it for a standalone business application?

The JUCE pricing is certainly far more reasonable than Qt.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#337

Post by furyofantares » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #84

rbanffy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform. Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is…

MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about. MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's pr…

How do you reconcile this with their history of bending over backwards to achieve backwards compatibility for third parties?

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#338

Post by zanderz » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #216

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

Windows until 24H2 (when Edge and the last remnants of IE were replaced by Chrome) supported HTML apps [1], introduced with Windows 98 Active Desktop. They weren't used much but actually not that bad for end-user needs. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536495...

It was decent, we shipped one but switched to .net because of high dpi scaling issues IIRC

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#339

Post by graemep » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

> Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.

The web is not consistent itself. Lots of sites, and most web apps, invent their own UI.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#340

Post by mwcampbell » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

rincebrain wrote: post #136

mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> WPF was good As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree. In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something…

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

Your argument presupposes that we should accept escalating baseline hardware requirements as good or even necessary, for a desktop computing world that was, from the user's perspective, doing pretty much the same thing as before. I reject that.