Microsoft Plans To Build 100% Native Apps For Windows 11 (techspot.com) 118
Microsoft is reportedly shifting Windows 11 app development back toward fully native apps. Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, said in a post on X that he is building a new team to work on Windows apps. "You don't need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer," he wrote. "If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." Huyn later said in a reply on X that the new Windows 11 apps will be "100% native." TechSpot reports: The description stands out at a time when many of Microsoft's built-in tools, including Clipchamp and Copilot, rely on web technologies and Progressive Web App architectures. The company's commitment to native performance suggests that some long-standing frustrations around responsiveness, memory use, and interface consistency could finally be addressed.
For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.
For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.
They don't want to make other OSes more attractive (Score:1)
Maybe they don't like how easy it is to move to another operating system when everything is available via the browser.
Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score:5, Informative)
They're not. Electron apps are not accessed via a browser. While it's true you can easily port an Electron app to GNU/Linux, that's also true of a .NET app (which, let's be honest, is likely what they're talking about here, I doubt they're going back to C++ for everything.)
The real advantage of Electron is you can use most of the same code and assets for a website as for an Electron application, which is useful, but given how ridiculously inefficient Electron is, that isn't much of a justification for using it. Over the last 15 years, most desktop operating system's UIs have been debased by increasingly inconsistent designs making them harder to use, and a huge amount of that has been designing for some superficial "web" design that doesn't really exist - at least, not in a form that stands still.
My sense of this:
Microsoft is in a panic. Almost everything different between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is disliked, from the centralized logins to the AI-with-everything. On top of this RAM prices are sky high meaning the bloat is rapidly becoming a problem. What they've realized is they have to do a full overhaul of Windows 11. And one of these is to stop using technologies like Electron where they shouldn't be used. They can literally reduce its memory footprint to Windows 7 levels, and make their code more reliable and less dependent on third party libraries and APIs by eliminating a rather absurd example of abstraction-for-abstraction's sake from their development stack.
This might even be good news.
Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score:5, Informative)
1.5 GB of RAM for an instant messaging app. It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.
And for those complete idiots who keep going on and on about how “memory that isn’t used is wasted memory,” I have two things to say to those clowns:
1) There is absolutely no reason to use 1GB of RAM for a task that you can easily handle with just 10MB of RAM. Just because your computer has 32GB of RAM doesn’t mean you have to use all of it just for your application;
2) Your application isn't the only thing running on the user's computer. What happens if the dozens of processes running on the user's computer all have the same idiotic idea of trying to reserve all the computer's memory for themselves?
Responsiveness too. (Score:3)
Don't forget about responsiveness! All these bloated pieces of shit are slow to start, slow to react to clicks, get into CPU usage loops or just hang entirely.
Or the fucking blight of PWAs that almost every time you start them give you a "Found an update. Restart or Later?" question that is just retarded to ask. 1Password and Signal are examples of this.
Re:Responsiveness too. (Score:4, Insightful)
So much this. Unless there is a reason you CANT continue without an update, or possibly on first run, you should never ask a user to update on start up. They already use the software. They did not click it because felt installing something right now. The clicked because they wanted to do something. Let them! Ask if they want to update on close and do it in the background!
If you feel you really must, you can pop up the 'what's new' dialog the next time they fire it up.
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Re: Responsiveness too. (Score:2)
Signal on Debian does not do that. It updates with the other apps, when I tell apt to update all my apps, and it never asks me to update.
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WhatsApp clearly needs to learn from Discord here and have a one line code that causes it to simply close and restart itself when the Electron framework finally has shat enough over your system resources that you're out of memory.
I'm obviously being sarcastic here, but I am unfortunately not joking about Discord: https://www.remio.ai/post/disc... [remio.ai]
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> It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.
I did an experiment once. Windows NT 3.5 could boot with 12MB of RAM. You really couldn't do anything with it, but it did boot up. As I recall, the whole OS only took up about 40MB of disk space.
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Microsoft's apps were bloated pigs long before Electron was a thing. I'm old enough to remember hearing these sorts of complaints regarding Office 2000... and even earlier.
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Sigh... the good old days. I ran Word 2.0 on WFW 3 with 16MB of memory. That was extravagant - they recommended 2MB.
And it did 95% of what I've ever done with a word processor.
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Then they unified the version numbers across the platforms and moved to this pcode stuff in v6. This was so bad and so slow on the Mac that they actually issued an apology for it. Things have gone downhill since then, and v6 was released 1994.
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Yeah but Work 6.0 on Windows was actually pretty good. It had everything you'd expect for the most part even in a contemporary word processor to day.
I don't think if took Word 2019 away from most users and gave them 6.0 they'd care much, if you could some how make the document compatibility issues vanish.
The problem with Word on Mac's was the Macs, by the time PC got 33 or 66mhz 486 CPUs, PCs were just better than Macs all around.
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I came back in the OS X era (can't remember if I ever had Cheetah, but I definitely had Jaguar) where although the chips were a bit slower overall it didn't matter much because the OS was just better. Now the chips are better, the OS is better (for versions of 'better' that don't include gaming)...but th
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yeah I was speaking historically. I use a Mac M1 at work and I like it. I know the newer machines are even better. I am not sure based on what I read mostly, that Apple Si is better than Zen, better at certain things but not all things. MacOS is better than Windows11, Windows11 is a steaming pile that should make anyone forced to use it want to scream, I know I do every encounter.
I love my Slackware PC at home. I XFCE is a better UI than MacOS at least if you are willing to tailor things to your liking.
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I have multiple computers, including a Macbook Air M1 at home, and it's great. Have been seeing some YouTube reviews recently that compared that w/ a Macbook Neo, and in most aspects, M1 came out on top. I bought this in 2021, and it's still serving me well
Its only shortcoming is that since it has to be charged via the Thunderbolt port, sometimes when I play games, the battery drains fast even though it's connected to power. Something that my other laptops w/ dedicated power supplies don't run into. O
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Actually, I was fine w/ every version of Office until Office 2003. Once 2007 came and changed the document formats to .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, I just hated it! But yeah, thinking back, Word for Windows 5 was really good. Don't think I used anything before that version
Only new thing they could have done might have been to produce 64-bit versions of those applications, just so that CPUs aren't compelled to support 32 or 16 bit subsets of their instruction sets
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Maybe they don't like how easy it is to move to another operating system when everything is available via the browser.
But that's a pretty limiting environment. For instance, I prefer using the YouTube app or the X app, as opposed to running it in a browser (currently, on my ancient Android tablet, I have to run YouTube in a browser b'cos that version of Android is no longer supported by YouTube from the Play store
No, Microsoft applications used to be pretty good in the 90s and 00s. It's ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store that things started going downhill. So maybe they're looking at revivi
Here we go again.... (Score:5, Interesting)
We've seen and heard this all before at Microsoft. The ebb and flow of industrial monopolists who fail to deliver on their market dominance because their customers and their employees are just NOT HAPPY. This is how it goes with big corporate entities who reign absolute control over their marketing campaigns, but not over reality. So go ahead Microsoft, say whatever you want about the epic failure of how you monetize your operating system and developers. Just remember, some of us have heard this all before, and we know how you really operate. Whatever floats your boat, but we know where this all leads....
Re:Here we go again.... (Score:5, Interesting)
They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.
Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.
Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.
I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.
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> Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake
I'm about 90% convinced they introduced the Ribbon for anti-trust reasons. Here's a change in UI that cannot be fully cloned by competitors (they'd have to make their own custom Ribbons with a custom, non Word, layout to avoid falling foul of copyrights), and which hampers users being able to transfer their skills from Word to, say, Wordperfect (or even Word to Excel.)
Look at the timings, with development occurring at a time when Microsoft had
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That's plausible.
I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what
Re: Here we go again.... (Score:2)
Re: Here we go again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used the hell out of MS Works. It did what I needed quickly and without the HUGE bloat of M$Office and Word. Though I came from a GML background so it was easy...
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I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.
It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.
If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.
Re: Here we go again.... (Score:3)
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They already exist. (Score:5, Informative)
They're called Portable Executables and end in EXE.
who cares. Install Linux. (Score:2)
who cares. Install Linux.
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Did that, tried to run one of those EXE and got an error. What do I do now?
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Yes, wine. A single bottle should suffice.
You still won't be able to run a .exe file but at least you'll be in a good mood.
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Lots Of Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lot of unsupported assumptions based on an X tweet.
It could just as easily be a new team to fuck up notepad.exe worse than they already have.
Native apps for your own OS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Native apps for your own OS (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML/CSS/DOM sucks rotting eggs for doing real GUI's. It was stretched way beyond it's original purpose of displaying static documents, and mutated into rocket spaghetti surgery and still has common GUI idioms missing or done wrong. [reddit.com]
I'm for an HTTPS-friendly GUI markup standard, by the way. Build it from the ground up for GUI's.
Notepad Failed To Launch (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe this partly stems from a recent Microsoft Store outage... that I shit you not... prevented NOTEPAD from functioning.
Yes, seriously.
https://windowsforum.com/threa... [windowsforum.com]
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Except Notepad is already a native app. The two concepts are unrelated. The outage was related to a license check (a stupid one), which literally any app could suffer from regardless of whether it is native or written in shitty web frameworks.
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Great but (Score:2)
We all know a Patch Tuesday is going to accidentally reverse them back into Electron-based PWAs eventually
Anyone else miss the days... (Score:2)
...When we called them programs? Or executables? I mean, they do end in .exe for a reason...
Re:Anyone else miss the days... (Score:5, Funny)
Funny. I thought they all ended in BSOD.
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The halting problem is undecidable.
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some end in .com but oh god yes I HATE the term app.
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I believe that only some DOS programs ended in .com. Nowadays, it's the most popular web TLD
Native is the new proprietary (Score:2)
Also, they are pretending to model a brain.. Google car is saying that
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Doesn't have to be: one can have an FOSS program, compile it to a particular CPU, and then it runs native!
Native (Score:1)
Can someone explain what a "100% native app" is, and how it's different to what Windows 11 currently has? What are some examples of "non-native apps"?
Re: Native (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Native (Score:2)
Yet Qt manages to be portable with local apps.
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Qt is a GUI toolkit that can, but doesn't have to, duplicate the look of the native GUI toolkit. Electron is Node + Chromium shoved in a box with your javascript. You being able to make it look like whatever you want is supposed to be a feature. Microsoft could easily do the same thing just by releasing their own collection of HTML widgets with Windows styling.
The real problem with things like Electron is that they just chuck Node and Chromium in a box with your javascript. They're Google's everything-will-
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You mean something from the pre-Unicode era? I doubt that /, would support it, since we'd be talking about browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer....
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Re:Native (Score:4, Insightful)
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Microsoft Teams is an egregious one. It used to be Electron-based and nominally used gigabytes of RAM, was horrifically slow, etc. So, they switched to their own WebView2 (i.e. embedded Edge instance) and now it typically uses hundreds of megabytes instead...
...but that's still hundreds of megabytes to display a chat window with some text and a few images. Yes, the kind of thing you could do in literally a handful of megabytes with native code. Instead, we have an entire browser engine rendering this stuff
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It does support video, which is what probably takes up all that memory. Otherwise their other messaging apps would use nowhere near that
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Nah, I think MS consider .NET code to be "native". The CIL gets JITted (and usually cached) into machine code at (or sometimes before) runtime. .NET apps don't have the massive overhead of an Electron app, for example. WinUI is native and not the worst UI toolkit MS have ever released - aesthetics aside.
Node.js and NW.js are only really awful because people realised if you just bundled them with a Chromium engine you could create multiplatform "desktop apps", and voila, you've invented Electron; 10x more re
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When I worked at MS we referred to stuff written in C/C++ as "native code" and stuff written in C# as "managed code."
But I left around the time that Electron/PWA stuff was catching on, so maybe that's changed.
Honestly Unexpected (Score:2)
I thought M$ was moving everything to "web code" so they would only have to maintain a single app architecture across the entire internet to feed their cloud data mining machine and somehow sucker most users into paying for Windows desktop as a thin client for web access.
The idea of returning to real development of native Windows applications means that corporate customers were very unhappy with the results of web/cloud first push.
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Honestly, I don't think Microsoft will be any more successful w/ Windows on Arm than they were back in the day w/ Windows NT on MIPS or Alpha. They had the same opportunity that NEXT had to make the OS and its ecosystem portable, but punted on it. Which is why NEC and later Compaq abandoned MIPS and Alpha. Otoh, NEXT ported NEXTSTEP to x86, Sparc and PA-RISC (albeit just the 32-bit versions), and when they got absorbed by Apple, they parallelly developed OS-X for both PowerPC and x86. Which is why it wa
Soaring RAM prices (Score:5, Interesting)
So more native code might be their way of signalling that they are going to tackle this issue, without admitting that Windows 11 bloat has gotten out of hand?
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Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.
I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.
I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.
And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.
I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash
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Windows does use more RAM than most, but it showing almost all the RAM full is the same kind of caching strategy that macOS uses. Apple eventually started calling this "Memory Pressure" [apple.com] and gave it a simple traffic lig
Finally? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Web apps make at least some sense when you are delivering the exact same app via the web and as a local application. But Microsoft isn't doing that, so they make none...
Perhaps people tired of that Client/Server feeling (Score:2)
Hmm, maybe they listened and will try to remove that Slop... Nah.
Oh please, oh please, oh please! (Score:3)
I'm tired of M$ apps on Mac. I wish this means they'll stop writing stuff for Macs.
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Just don't get them! I have nothing from either Microsoft nor Google on my M1 Macbook Air
Finally (again) (Score:2)
I am so sick of web technologies everywhere, especially where they do not bellong.
My computer is thousand of times faster than my first , and yet, at so many tasks it is slower because of bad app design.
What especially drives me nuts is responsive, but non working UI.
You press on the button, get a nice "click response", but nothing happens. Typical of app designed with "modern" technologies.
Bring back older, WORKING, technologies which will bring consistency between apps, high responsiveness, low ressource
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The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.
There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.
There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a soft
Open Development (Score:2)
I wonder why Microsoft does not go 100% open source for windows apps, as to ensure that customers are not exposed to "enshittification" risks of their favourite apps by suboptimal cloud and AI inclusions or product upgrades. These days you cannot be sure that your favourite app will be available in two years time. WIN 11 is already so much worse than Win 10.
Microsoft Flight Simulator (Score:2)
Good! ClipChamp is a great example of why.... (Score:2)
ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!
It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to th
left unsaid (Score:2)
"If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." ...so I can remove you as a direct competitor to our slop.
Re: the only reason (Score:3)
Agreed but Apple's app store model is so profitable and self sustaining ide is going to make Microsoft cash
Re: the only reason (Score:3)
Re: the only reason (Score:2)
Re: the only reason (Score:5, Informative)
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They won't. Some misguided twits seem to think it's a kind of badge of honour to remain backwards. It stopped being an omission and started being a decision long ago.
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Just like /. - a site ostensibly tech-centric, does not support IPv6
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it's because Slashdot does not support Unicode
They don't have to support Unicode (which would open the door to all kinds of weird posts), just convert what can be to ascii, for instance 'é' to 'e', and remove the rest.
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Because there are still other ways of finding and installing software.
Expect that to change as Microsoft tries to hoard a bigger slice of the pie.
developer market share (Score:3)
It is the old Microsoft giving Office away to college students to maintain market share story.
Working on desktop apps which do not ha a HTML based UI is some combination of .C# NET (VB.net is not in the running)
- Win32 C++ / C
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- Hard to maintain "solutions" built on top of Office
- Third party apps
Microsoft may be admitting to a COBOL moment where finding new developers for Win32/C++ or C#/.net desktop applications is increasingly difficult. ..." statem
Due to the "In 2 years, I will have marketable skills in
Re:developer market share (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these technologies are overlapping, but each was intended to coral devs into making Metro apps or Windows Store apps and burn their bridges in the process. It went down like a lead balloon. Now they're dialing back trying to make WinUI somewhat platform agnostic to the version of Windows its running on but who knows if it will stick. It's not the only pain point because Microsoft even extended the C++ language to deal with these APIs with new types like "ref", "partial" and hat notation to deal with garbage collected objects, auto generated classes and other things that also impedes portability.
So it's no wonder that app developers have gone for web apps (and QT) because it's makes it easier to write portable apps and acts as insulation from Microsoft's mercurial view of the world.
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In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.
Yes, Office is still king, although I think that cr
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Yeah, I immediately thought of Flutter too. A few years back, MS was big on Flutter, and even contributed a decent amount of code and patches.
Lackof developers in general (Score:2)
With AI being all the focus for 3 years now, there is/will be a severe shortage of developers with experience in current or 5 - 10 year old development environments.
The pile of legacy technologies grows with less developers ever getting experience in
- desktop development ... The new HTML template replaces most of the bloated legacy react/angular framework
- mobile development
- legacy web frameworks - angular, react,
It's not just the percent of developers with knowledge of the legacy technology, it is the pe
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