You can use WhatsApp in your browser: web.whatsapp.com No 1 GB or installation needed Why is the desktop app even a thing?
It will use 1gb on your browser.
Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
71–80 of 402 posts
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#72For someone who travels a lot, I would love to have the ability to have WhatsApp on multiple phones (like telegram). I have a separate phone for traveling to US/Canada, which I usually wipe clean before crossing. It's really cumbersome to backup/restore Whatsapp messages from one phone to another. Or I just lose the messages that I send/receive while traveling.
I don't use WhatsApp so I have no idea what that is like. I have telegram running on two mobile devices and two desktops. There is no "moving messages" or "losing messages", I just install telegram or telegram desktop and all my chats appear with all the messages.
Everybody is on telegram today, it's not like five years ago when people did not know what it was.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#73Off topic but I hate being forced to use Facebook properties like WhatsApp.
I’m forced to be in parent group chats in this accursed ecosystem and give Zuck another DAU.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#74I remember doing voice and video calls, and of course IM, on a PC with 128MB of RAM and a single core CPU around the turn of the century. It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.
> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
A reasonable comment, unfairly downvoted.
That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions.
The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist.
Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful software.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#75I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents…
While I don’t have as many problems as you seem to, I did notice that it was much slower (like a minute or two) to “connect” after opening the window compared to before.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#76People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places? Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now. Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.” Many applications just use a lot if it’s available. RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Honestly I think you're mostly correct. The amount of people using WhatsApp on the desktop is probably rather limited, certainly in the scope of WhatsApp usage in general. Memory, while I feel that a gigabyte is way to much for what is essentially a chat app, it is virtual memory, so it's not as problematic as I'd like it to be.
The issue, I think, is who the desktop users are. They sales people, they are people who conduct business over WhatsApp. The buyers at a previous job uses whatever the sellers in Asia, eastern Europe and the middle east are using. A long time ago, that was mostly Skype, now it WhatsApp. There a huge benefit to having WhatsApp on your desktop, with easy copy/paste, Excel and everything you need to make the deals.
Maybe Meta doesn't believe you should do business over WhatsApp and don't wont to cater to that crowed.
I would love to see what a professional Windows application developer, if those are still around, could do with a native WhatsApp client. Using modern C++, or just C# and all the tooling provided by the platform, how small and functional could you actually make something like that.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#77You can use WhatsApp in your browser: web.whatsapp.com No 1 GB or installation needed Why is the desktop app even a thing?
So what's your shortcut to switch to Whatsapp if it's inactive, launch it if it's not running, and hide it if it's active, in a browser tab?
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you have to switch apps to the browser, find which browser window has the session you want, switch to the tab, etc., instead of just switching to WhatsApp app via keyboard or taskbar directly. The ergonomics are significantly worse. I want most of my browser windows full screen. I don't want my instant messenger full screen. Using it in a browser means I have to have one size, and resizing one changes the other.…
I use the WhatsApp Web PWA and it allows me to have a dedicated window/app for it? Sure it's a little quirky at times (eg it closes if the browser restarts for update) and it doesn't have a system tray icon, but aside from that, it behaves like a separate app.
> Sure it's a little quirky at times
So it doesn't behave like a separate app.
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#79Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you c…
Windows doesn't even feel like a native Windows app anymore.
Same could be said for macOS, sadly. Today it looks like a bad render from a teenager in 2012
Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
#80Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you c…
Your reasoning seems counter intuitive as back in 2012 Facebook rewrote their HTML5 based app to native iOS code, optimized for performance, and knowingly took the feature parity hit. https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-n...
It's a tradeoff, different companies are allowed to chose differently or even to change their mind after some time.