Comment by publicdebates
5 days ago
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
5 days ago
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?
That was actually fun if not very useful (I had a dynamic school timetable programmed as my "wallpaper" as I was in high school at the time).
Not very useful because you quickly realize you mostly obscure your desktop with actual applications you want to use on your computer.
They tried fixing that by creating widgets, but effectively had the same problem. Then they tried fixing that by making them always present, but then you just lose desktop space. I guess it makes sense if you have two monitors, but at that point, why not just have the full apps open in those same spots? Widgets are a great idea that I wish we could make useful somehow.