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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

This might be a stupid question, but is MS Teams Electron on Windows? It would strike me as weird that the maker of the operating system doesn't use their own UI toolkits?

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Skype is made with Electron too and so is VSCode. They do like most developers do - if they need a cross platform app, they use Electron. Although I think they are pushing for React Native (maybe?), which can use native controls.

Yep! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-memory....

Teams 2.0 in Windows is moving away from Electron but still using web based technology. It's not going to use Chromium to render, it'll use Edge Webview2 that comes with the OS.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

WebView2 is Chromium-based

Isn't Edge just Chromium these days? The page you linked says:

> Evergreen distribution. Rely on an up-to-date version of Chromium with regular platform updates and security patches.

Isn't Edge just a Chromium reskin?

Good lord. I can't imagine Apple putting out an Electron app.

MS Teams has to work cross platform or no one would use it, they'd be "Slack except worse because part of your team can't have it."

It's not like Apple is maintaining iMessage anywhere except their own platforms. And even with that, until very recently the Mac version was second class compared to iOS, only catching up when Marzipan/Catalyst let them share one codebase between the two versions.

So that's not exactly Apple using Electron, but it's still a good example of "Even a giant company like Apple has trouble effectively maintaining separate cross platform versions of the same product."

Microsoft makes many terrific MacOS native apps (the most obvious of course being O365), idk if they have MS teams for Linux but I doubt that’d be a reason for using electron.

If Microsoft was developing Office today as a greenfield app, it would surely be Electron based.

And likely be terrible and would get no market share. I don’t know anyone who lives in excel all day who would be ok with the jankiness of an electron app

If anybody can afford to write native apps, it's Microsoft. How many Teams users are there? Tens of millions? The cost of developing native apps spread across all those users is pretty much zero.

I think the real reason Microsoft went Electron is because they plan on extending it to eventually take control of Electron on Windows. So they need some big Electron-based applications to justify that.

It already is "Slack except worse". The Catalyst comparison is an interesting one though, Catalyst on macOS is still pretty horrible in terms of usability, but a lot better than Electron on system resources.

The Apple Music app was effectively an Electron app for a few years before the Catalyst version arrived, just a shell around webviews. And even now, there's still a bunch of webviews in the app today.

Mac Messages was comically just a plain webview for years. Again, that changed with Catalyst.

Uh no. The old client's chat transcript was using WebView for display with a bunch of custom-fed CSS/HTML/DOM that was built in code. The rest of the app was good ol' AppKit.

The whole chat transcript being a web view thing was one of the main reasons the app eventually got killed in favor of a Catalyst version. There was zero expertise in the team to make all the random new transcript features that the designers kept throwing on the iOS client and there was also no way to reuse the knowledge and code of the iOS team either. Various attempts to rewrite the mac client's chat transcript to native throughout the years failed due to lack of resources and/or corporate bullshit.

> Uh no. The old client's chat transcript was using WebView for display with a bunch of custom-fed CSS/HTML/DOM that was built in code. The rest of the app was good ol' AppKit.

Yes, I overstepped, the sidebar was probably an NSTableView and the text input looked native enough. I still find it comical that the star of the show, the transcript, was a webview.

> due to lack of resources and/or corporate bullshit

I suspected as much, and again, it's comical. Trillion dollar company. Apple, of all companies, can afford to pay Meta-level comp or higher, roll out big recruiting efforts across the US and Canada and let engineers work in more cities, and yet they've only barely started in the last couple years.

MacOS 12.3 just changed that and the difference is incredible. All the Apple music screens load much faster, especially the search one that previously was not just slow but also broken

No, instead Apple has Catalyst to give things that slightly janky, cheap-port feel.

Yet they even use WebKit to render parts of their own OS settings.

Can you imagine the monstrosity that is iTunes on Windows? Far worse than any Electron app.

It was a monstrosity on macOS too.

Apple puts web views in its platforms all the time.

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is Electron, too.

The best part is that when Azure Explorer crashes (days that end in "y"), it wipes out all of my VSCode windows, too!

Yay, Electron!

It's not weird, it's telling. Microsoft clearly sees Electron as the future of desktop development.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft embraced Chromium for Edge because they are going to make some big bets on Electron-style development.

Windows 11 shell UI seems to be mostly web. I remember how during beta testing people kept finding widgets were you could accidentally trigger Chrome's caret browsing prompt when pressing F7.

Even Microsoft's native applications can feel off. For example, I use Outlook for my email and really dislike its editor. When I type, I want the text to snap into existence immediately as I type. In Outlook it feels like it glides into being and doesn't even keep up to fast typing. Word is like this too, but fortunately I don't have to use it very often.

Because of this, I write longer emails in a text editor and paste it into Outlook when I'm done.

This was an added feature, so it stands to reason that it should still be able to be turned off.

Try this if you haven’t already: https://superuser.com/questions/989951/is-it-possible-to-dis...

Every month or after a fresh install you can't start the clock or calculator app because it needs an update. It's not even an automatic update you need to open the app to get notified that there is an update. Insane.

Disabling that is a checkbox away in the settings. Coincidentally, I really like the glide effect and wish it existed on macOS.

Which parts exactly? If anything explorer.exe has never been more native (it used to have a lot of HTML elements in Win98 to XP). I think new control panel and start menu are WinUI based.

And OneDrive is in Qt!

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