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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft not shipping a native Windows client is an extremely un-Microsoft thing, and it sends extremely mixed signals about the desktop.

Edit: baffling downvote?

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Yes, Office nowadays is also heavily invested into using Webviews, and then there is all that buzz about hybrid apps with Blazor.

Every time I watch the WinUI community talk it seems like trying to sell us the platform, after all the mismanagment with UWP.

The sad part is when asked about why features X, Y, Z from Forms or WPF still aren't coming in WinUI, they mostly react as if hearing about the said feature for the first time. That is how well the team knows the frameworks they are trying to replace.

Yeah, I had to research this for work purposes recently and ended up using the Nokia "burning platform" image in the presentation. Microsoft got really badly punched in the face by the failure of Windows Phone and UWP, and they've not managed to backport it successfully to the desktop.

WinUI3 good news: it's open source! You can see it on github.

Bad news: it's only just made 1.0, and because it's on github you can see that the team devoted to it is absolutely tiny.

Not a Teams user. You're telling me the windows Teams client is built with electron rather than native? That is extremely telling.

It's much better than the web version though, which feels like a degraded experience in almost every aspect.

Also what is up with Microsoft's redirect-through-15-domains authentication. Completely unreasonable for anyone that has their browser set up securely.

15 domains.

Really?

It's hard to define what "native" even means on Windows these days. For a while, writing WinRT apps in HTML/JS was an officially blessed thing, for example.

I can't find any reason other than "we will only code things once and run everywhere". Considering the scale of users, a native client is a no brainer

For a while I have contemplated creating a lightweight native version of Teams. According to the Teams API it should be possible, I believe

It can simply be c#, no need to go any deeper. But it would be a huge boost in performance

I would love ANY alternative to Microsoft's Teams app!

I'm working on a vanilla JS web app alternative if you're interested, OperCom. You can see its current status at [1] and keep updated at [2]

[1] https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/

[2] https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact

At this point you discover that there are at least three different options for C# UI, all of which have significant drawbacks. The performance of a WinForms Teams UI would be fantastic, though.

Agree on WinForms, but why wouldn't WPF also be fine? Granted it leaks a bit of memory here and there, but not much

Development of WPF was abandoned more than decade ago.

I thought WPF was the de facto current standard for Windows apps and everything else (MAUI etc) is too experimental and hardly promising

MS certainly is using WPF in some areas (Dynamics 365 client framework comes to mind)

Desktop apps died more than 1 decade ago. Most people's don't install any program on their computer outside of Chrome.

Wrong.

Are there actually genuine stats around this? There's no question there's a class of users these days that have limited use for apps other than their browser (and maybe Adobe Reader for signing/ form-filling PDFs, presumably that will be possible via a browser plugin soon enough too). Those users are presumably not HN readers though (there's at least 20 desktop apps I rely on every day, and another 20 I use weekly or more).

Edit: the Adobe website claims you can do form fill and sign of PDFs from within a browser, but it's never worked for me. Recently had to initial every page of a 78-page PDF, which my fairly beefy machine struggled a bit with (it was truly painful on my partner's lower spec machine), I'm curious how feasible that would be in a browser.

Most people didn't have a general-purpose computer thirty years ago. We are going back to that state of things. Those who want one, then and now, will have one.

More than one decade ago was, at best, 2011. There were plenty of desktop apps back then. Most messengers were real desktop apps, then, for example.

Everyone I know with a desktop computer installs & uses tons of programs that aren't Chrome. And most of them aren't programmers or other flavors of computer nerd.

The non-nerds also absolutely notice when some stupid Electron chat app makes their laptop hot and takes their battery life from 16 hours to 2.5 hours (ahem, Discord when using voice and/or video chat). Proponents of that tech claim normal users don't notice, but 1) they definitely, 100% do, and 2) more than one might think are even able to figure out which app, specifically, is responsible, not just "my machine's slow and battery's dying fast and I don't know why" (it's usually not exactly rocket science).

You're kidding, right? There are a lot of Linux users who are screaming for system tray support on many apps. My college is totally on board with Office 365, but I haven't owned Windows in over twenty years. I inherited a Windows desktop in my office, but it mostly stays powered off in a corner.

My system tray has Slack, Discord, Teams, and VLC pretty much all the time. My taskbar often gets rather loaded with how I switch between workflows, and I've already got the Outlook PWA stuck there doing nothing. I was really hoping I could eventually have a native Outlook electron app (I feel a bit iffy installing a third party solution), but instead I'm gaining another app that sits there 90% of the time doing nothing.

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