Comment by aaomidi

16 days ago

When Microsoft themselves use electron to develop apps what expectations can we have on other devs?

Microsoft has always stood for mediocre quality software so that's no surprise.

Also, they stopped caring about Windows because they want recurring service revenue. Making Windows a subscription service for consumers would outrage the users (even though they kinda already do this for business with Microsoft 365). So the consumer market is just viewed as a billboard for M365 and Copilot. So everything you see there is just lowball effort, even worse than their normal quality.

To do better?

It's demonstrably possible. And further, why does what some portion of Microsoft, a huge, multi-headed beast, does qualify as the bar for what is reasonable for users to expect?

  • This, and add to that the fact that web apps make it trivial for the dev to just randomly change the GUI out from under me without my consent or ability to prevent it, and, well, wonder why I and so many others dislike them? I want to be able to refuse app updates, thank you very much.

  • A question - Which portion of Microsoft, the multi-headed beast develops pure-native apps now ? Even the Windows 11 Settings app is Javascript.

    The multi-headed beast has been assimilated by web-tech. They can't code GUI C++ no more - except their compiler/graphics team. And even the latter are dying.

  • As a user Microsoft is windows and windows is Microsoft.

    If doing native apps was realistic then I’d expect windows, Microsoft, etc to also do them.

To decide what tools are the right job for each project,

same expectation as always.

So many “let’s race-to-the-bottom along with the authority” comments on HN lately.

Dude: no! =]

  • I think more so I’m saying that the platform (metaphorical ship) is sinking.

    Majority of applications on Linux are native applications. Maybe the problem is the platform?

    • Yeah exactly, on Linux I mostly use Qt apps and they're great. Even Telegram is native. The only one that I use that isn't is Obsidian. But all these notetaking apps are electron (and markdown) somehow.

Considering people are leaving Windows in part because Microsoft is shoving web slop into it, perhaps other devs should learn the lesson that it's not acceptable to use web frameworks on the desktop.