Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

The submitted title:

> Windows 11 settings rewritten in React Native

The article title:

> React Native for Windows is helping Settings improve more quickly

From near the start of the article:

> In this blog post, we discuss how and why Microsoft is using React Native for Windows to deliver the Your Microsoft Account page in Windows 11 Settings.

This isn’t the entire Settings app, but rather one specific page that used to only be available online, but now they want it available in the Settings app too:

> Enabling you to manage your account information directly from the Windows 11 Settings is one of the key goals for the new Your Microsoft Account page. Before Windows 11, your only option for managing these settings was to visit the account.microsoft.com website (“AMC”). The team wanted to have a consistent set of functionality and user experience between the native and web versions and considered several options to accomplish this […]

The reasoning behind their choosing React Native does not apply for anything else in the Settings app in any way, so I don’t think you can expect to see anything else using React Native any time soon.

This is true, but it allows them to test the waters. If it is successful, it further opens the door to web-style programming on windows. And as MS keeps switching their UI story, having react to force them on an externally dictated standard might finally mean, well, a default UI default framework on windows again. Something we've been missing since Win32 ruled the earth.

Going from the oldest UI elements Win11 currently has, IIRC it something from Win2k, all the way up to React Native, Windows is becoming a living museum of UI.

Lol. Sad but true. It's hard to unify all the inconsistency, since the tech changes by day.

It is hard, but Microsoft has the workforce and knowledge to do it. Yet they are not comitted to it, one reason being compatibility. There are businesses today relying on 10+ year old custom solutions developed for XP.

This React Native work is using the same "default UI framework" from Windows 8 (WinUI/WinRT, whatever you want to call it), the big thing that has shifted was Windows 8 did JS bindings directly inside IE11 and "Spartan" Edge and now the preferred tool seems to React Native when working with JS (or TS).

(Which in some ways is actually a regression from the Windows 8 approach because the IE11/"Spartan" Edge-backed plan supported WinRT bindings and WinUI user interfaces "progressively" in PWAs: rather than recompiling your JS for React Native with its own React Native "skin" there was a more direct path to "upgrade" a regular web-hosted app and boring "old fashioned" HTML DOM to WinRT/WinUI. Somewhat ironically, too, the WinUI name even came from these earlier Windows 8 efforts, but WinUI.js died as Microsoft decoupled WinRT bindings from IE11/"Spartan" Edge and never got a "3.0".)

I think the narrative that Microsoft keeps switching their UI story is more about the confusion of the shifting bindings than actually about the stack as whole. The stack is relatively consistent over time, just things like .NET versions kept changing (and where .NET fits with respect to the application hosting model/lifecycle) and JS saw this regression from being a "first class" supported binding with a path for PWAs to it's finally back in React Native (and currently only React Native), and even is starting to feel "first class" again, if you don't mind React Native now as the only way forward.

Sure but if you use the original title you don’t get karma e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30360119

Just wait until someone adds ONE LINE of Rust to Windows!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus...

The XBox dashboard and Office are other examples of React Native creeping in, and I edited the subject because the title isn't clear about the blog contents.

Xbox and Office are irrelevant here. You editorialised the title, from something that was accurate and sufficiently clear to something that’s factually inaccurate and wildly misleading. (It isn’t Settings but a small part, it isn’t a rewrite but of new functionality, and the “improve more quickly” the title mentioned is crucial to the purpose of the article, which is explaining why they chose React Native for this piece—this being a React Native for Windows blog post, not a Windows blog post.) If you still can, please revert the title to the original.

Changed above. Thanks!

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