Comment by nxobject
11 hours ago
Intel advertising the fact that their schedulers can keep MS Teams confined to the efficiency cores... what a sad reflection of how bloated Teams is.
We make a single Electron-like app grow, cancer-like, to do everything from messaging and videoconferencing to shared drive browsing and editing, and as a result we have to contain it.
It can run in your browser too.The electron part isn't the bloat but the web part. Web devs keep using framework on top of frameworks and the bloat is endless. Lack of good native UX kits forces devs to use web-based kits. Qt has a nice idea with qml but aside from some limitations, it is mostly C++ (yes, pyqt,etc.. exist).
Native UI kits should be able to do better than web-based kits. But I suspect just as with the web, the problem is consistency. The one thing the web does right is deliver consistent UI experience across various hardware with less dev time. It all comes down to which method has least amounts of friction for devs? Large tech companies spent a lot of time and money in dev tooling for their web services, so web based approaches to solve problems inherently have to be taken for even trivial apps (not that teams is one).
Open source native UX kits that work consistently across platforms and languages would solve much of this. Unfortunately, the open source community is stuck on polishing gtk and qt.
There are a bunch of new native UI toolkit as well, such as Slint [https://slint.dev]
> The electron part isn't the bloat but the web part.
The bloat part is the bloat. Web apps can made to be perfectly performant if you are diligent, and native apps can be made to be bloated and slow if you're not.
Sometimes I find myself wistfully thinking of Java Swing applets with native theme settings.
They say nostalgia is always deceptive, but I miss ~java2 era UX.
1 reply →
>But I suspect just as with the web, the problem is consistency.
That is indeed the "problem" at its core. People are lazy, operating systems aren't consistent enough.
Operating systems came about to abstract all the differences of countless hardware away, but that is no longer good enough. Now people want to abstract away that abstraction: Chrome.
Chrome is the abstraction layer to Windows, MacOS, iOS, Linux, Android, BSD, C++, HTML, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Python, desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all the other things. You develop for Chrome and everyone uses Chrome and everyone on both sides gets the same thing for a singular effort.
If I were to step away from all I know and care about computers and see as an uncaring man, I have to admit: It makes perfect sense. Fuck all that noise. Code for Chrome and use by Chrome. The world can't be simpler.
These days you need a CPU, a GPU, a NPU and a TPU (not Tensor, but Teams Processing Unit).
In my case, the TPU is a seperate Mac that also does Outlook, and the real work gets done on the Linux laptop. I refer to this as the airgap to protect my sanity.
Intel and Windows have been birds of a feather for 40 years, and it frustrates me that to this day Intel is still designing its CPUs around Windows. Yes, Windows is “#1” in market share. It’s just sad that the world accepts the ads in Windows 11, Teams being an electron app, x86 when ARM is the clear winner (at least for laptops), all the other Windows nonsense.
Teams is technically WebView2 and not Electron… with a bunch of native platform code.
It’s amazing what computers can do today and how absolutely inefficient they are used.