Electron apps are ruining the Windows 11 experience, and even the JavaScript creator has warned against ‘rushed web UX over native,’ but it doesn’t look like that will change Microsoft’s plans. In a post on X and other places, Microsoft reaffirmed its commitment to AI in Windows 11 and encouraged Electron developers to consider using AI in their apps.
I would actually be for keyboards having a dedicated AI key, because then I would always have a key to remap to my voice PTT without loosing anything useful.
Sure, I love it when a 50KB app takes 50MB because some cunt designer only knows HTML.
this solidifies two of my predictions from 15-20 years ago.
- Microsoft is moving to an “internet required” OS, likely meaning cloud based OS
- all apps will become web apps
my final prediction from then was subscription based access to your operating system, apps, and data. you own nothing. your data is constantly consumed and used to train their products. you will never be able to extract your data and will be forever locked-in to their product. this also means that you will have to pay extra for app use. need to use Photoshop? that’s an extra fee. need to use 3D rendering software? thats the ultra package with GPU fees per hour.
most of this is actually happening under the covers, but nothing is locking us in.
I would say we have about 5-7 years before the above happens and there’s no way back.
Inner-platform effect in full swing. Windows exists only to run Chrome. Chrome is the new OS layer.
-> push software that needs tons of ram
-> cause ram shortage
-> ???
-> …profit?
At least for Enterprise where the real money is, “???” seems to be https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/windows-365-enterprise
This isn’t some grand plan 5d chess. The people running these companies are dumb as hell and lucky. They get convinced from one silicon valley thought leader’s blog post that ai and electron are the future and then direct the entire company in that direction thinking they’re a great leader who will be remembered for pushing the company in a novel direction at just the right time. They attend a talk by a different thought leader who talks about a future of ai cloud computers that anyone can access from anywhere with more computational power than could ever fit into the shitty laptop they’re accessing it from, then they go to the board meeting the next day with their bright new idea to do cloud personal desktops.
These companies are entirely responding to (nonsensical) market forces and the whims of high ranking individuals within their ranks. It’s painful and ridiculous.
To be clear, there are some benefits to provisioning enterprise devices in a tightly controlled cloud environment, but we’ve all seen ideas with “some benefits” get shot down by managers and CEOs who “don’t get why anyone would want that” so I’m not keen on giving Microsoft too much credit.
-> …profit?
They’re already hitting the storage side of things pretty hard.
Buy up all of the hardware on the planet to have a monopoly on compute/storage -> rent the compute/storage to everyone who can’t buy it.
See also: Housing
Posting scammy Amazon links feels like cheating when having these discussions, but I kinda get where they’re coming from. The fact that people can try to sell a laptop with only 64gb disk is absolutely mental to me, because that’s not even enough to let the BASE OS run normally and update reliably. And that’s before you start doing anything on it.
We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.
If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.
the worst thing about electron apps besides everything about election apps are the fact that there’s no shared libraries so you basically have to have a billion of the same node modules on your system for every electron app that you have.
Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.
Javascript creator thinks they are rushing things.One can learn from their mistakes
Move to Linux while you still can (unless you are living already in California and it’s forbidden)
Linux is forbidden in California? America’s a weird fuckin place.
No, it’s not forbidden. No idea what that commenter is talking about.
Age verification bill is approved in California https://www.techradar.com/computing/software/californias-age-verification-law-is-proving-controversial-heres-what-you-need-to-know-and-why-some-linux-distros-are-in-the-firing-line
So yes basically the end result will be, Microsoft and Apple will implement age verification (aka ID check) on Os level. And Linux will not, meaning the state will prohibit the use of any Linux distribution that is not following their law.
I suspect they are talking about the new California law that says all operating systems, including Linux, need to have some form of age verification at account setup. Planned to go into effect Jan 2027.
Yup
It’s the age check thing that make things weird in foss
It’s a free country
Microsoft also make the one app that actually shines in electron: vs code. It’s really quite optimised. But somehow they didn’t bother learning lessons from that and keep rolling out terrible slop like teams and new outlook.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.
I can’t stand VScode, whoever decided a text editor should be written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript deserves to be shot
I just realized I’ve been staring at this picture for over a minute, trying to figure out what it means. What does this picture mean?
Part of a old joke about various big tech org charts. Microsoft divisions are purported to be in not only fighting with each other but also within themselves.
Even thought Microsoft is one company, all the internal teams are separate, don’t communicate and usually do what they want with no regard to anything else the other teams are doing. Been an issue with Microslop for years, and its especially noticeable in their office/email divisions.
Ahh. That seems suboptimal and makes the picture make a lot more sense, thanks.
Tbf vscode has opensource contributors and they had the code for atom text editor (by developers of electron and github) to look as reference code.
Rip Atom, it’s a shame microsoft bought github and ended your development to promote their IDE. Who could have known they have no morals.
Atom was indeed very good. There are still forks out there.
Isn’t VS Code open-sourced? Can those optimizations be contributed to the wider community of electron experts?
I guess my point is VS Code works well because the users can fix it and they have the ability to do so. The same cant be said for Teams & Outlook. No one can fix that PoS.
And code is stolen from atom. But yes.
The next step in app delivery is shipping a full VM with the operating system and the app.
Docker?
Snap/Flatpak basically (I know containers are not exactly VMs)
Minesweeper as a Docker container.
Once again, Microslop is a strong contender for Linux Marketer Of The Year award
Yeah sounds like an AI agent decided that.
Today it took almost 30 seconds for the context menu to appear when I right clicked on a file in windows explorer. I mean ffs, if I wanted everything to be a browser, I’d use a chromebook.
(Inb4 “install linux”, it’s a work computer and I don’t get a say in OS)
Look into cleaning up your context menu shell extensions: just a single bad one will freeze your context menu exactly how you described it.
Unfortunately, I have literally zero control over what’s installed on my computer at work
work computer, Win 11, here. I need to lock my PC when I leave my desk. Over the last month or 2 (maybe more?) when I 3 finger salute to lock, it used to open in a moment, now I can count to at least 4 before the screen comes up
Windows+L locks it directly, fyi
Theres another windows+L shortcut as well, windows+ctrl+shift+alt+l. It opens linkedin. Because why not
Oh, nice, tks. too bad they have destroyed many of our trust. Thankfully there is no win 11 at home on any pc and only 1 win 10 that I do not maintain. GF and I are both on linux
Dude. Same. Windows 11 at work is fucking awful.
My laptop idles at 12 out of 16 gigs of RAM free.
Right clicking takes dozens of seconds, especially on a network share.
Did IT remove a letter mapped network drive? Haha! Fuck you! Windows hangs indefinitely if you open Windows explorer. You gotta fuck around in the registry to remove that shit.
The only good thing about windows 11 is tabs in Windows explorer. Which MacOS and Linux have had for a gazillion years.
I can’t even type normally anymore in teams. Since it will hang my business laptop during typing. It’s so awful.
Really Teams is the worst product.
Microsoft don’t care about file shares anymore anyway, they want you to sign up for OneDrive :(
This reminds me that many years ago, there was a small market for better file managers in Windows. Most were more like “side grades” that were better in some ways, but worse than others, but there was one that was way better than all of them called Directory Opus. It was silly expensive for the time (I want to say like $80), and most others were free, but holy shit was it feature filled, including tabs, and just really good. It was also a bit heavy compared to explorer back then. Now it probably runs insanely fast and is still way better. I just looked and it still exists at basically the same price, but any sane person considering it should just leave Windows.
Even in Edge, Outlook (a Microslop web app running on a Microslop browser) sometimes takes up to a minute to load on refresh. HOW!? God I hate that company.
Lmao yup, the desktop app, ‘new’ outlook takes up to 30 minutes to load sometimes
I’ve never had outlook take long, always done in about 5 seconds. Firefox too, which would be the last to optimise for.
Find a new job
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Install linux
Just like the good old days of running Windows 3.1 on an Intel 386sx. We’ve come full circle.
Win 3.1 wasn’t even that slow on a 386sx (yay, 386 buddies! o/), its nothing compared to Win 11 on midrange and lower laptops these days. Then again, those CPUs usually came in PCs with Win 3.0, so Win 3.1 was definitely noticeably heavier. MS also wasn’t nearly as large and well funded back then, there is no excuse for this other than pure incompetence.
Just build Electron native or something, christ.
