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.
This quote from the article is fucking hilarous:
Discord has also openly admitted that its Windows app is a resource hog, and it has rolled out a feature that allows the app to restart itself when RAM usage exceeds 4GB.
Why is my Electron “Hello World” app 10Gb?
Repeat with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
with me.
INSTALL LINUX!
-
Not really surprising considering Windows seems to be increasingly swapping their native shell components for Web Views (you can tell because sometimes they fail to load (: )
-
You know it’s bad when Brendan fucking Eich is the reasonable one
Why is settings getting so bad, its like using a nonfunctional electron app.
Ah that explains so much.
They turned themselves into users of their own zero code solutions for shitware.
-
FYI for those who don’t know what electron is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
[…] desktop applications using web technologies (mainly HTML, CSS and JavaScript […])
Every damn fucking time MSFT is mentioned: Install Linux, Problem Solved.
I’m not listening to Microsoft anymore
Sure, I love it when a 50KB app takes 50MB because some cunt designer only knows HTML.
Can someone explain what an electron app is?
Basically, you know how Spotify allows you to use the version you access on the web as if it’s an app (all the features are there)? That’s called a Progressive Web App (PWA). Basically, Electron apps open up their own browser to run a PWA. Why is this bad? 2 Chrome tabs already take up a lot of memory. Now imagine 3.
That was a fantastic explanation. Thank you.
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.
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.
-> 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.
Inner-platform effect in full swing. Windows exists only to run Chrome. Chrome is the new OS layer.
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
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.
It’s weird how one company can do things right and also be do incompetent at the same time.
The way MS is structured internally, this is like being surprised that some NFL teams win the Super Bowl and some teams are the Cleveland Browns.
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.
I can’t stand VScode, whoever decided a text editor should be written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript deserves to be shot
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.
