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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

So they are moving from Electron to Webview2. Basically saving memory and CPU resources by sharing WebView 2 runtime which is default on Windows 11.

Doesn’t sounds like a big improvement to me at all.

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Trying to build full-on real applications with hypertext and its macros has never been a good idea in the first place. It keeps surprising me that companies that have all resources to build proper, native, efficient first-class desktop apps, opt for what is effectively a very advanced word processor instead. Some also insist that it's the only way of building desktop apps now.

This world desperately needs a modern native multi-protocol desktop IM client. By "desktop", I mean using fully native controls (appkit/win32/gtk, yes, three separate GUI implementations), taking advantage of multiple windows, and ignoring the existence of touchscreens. I may build one in the future.

MS teams is the only electron app on my computer that feels slow. Microsoft has done an almost uniquely bad job.

Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back. Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

Mind if I ask what OS you're on? On macos I use teams a lot and it is very fast even when resources are tight yet you're not the first person I heard say it is slow.

It's super slow on windows, but VSCode has become very slow, too.

Not the parent, but I use teams in macOS. I wouldn’t call it fast, but I also haven’t experienced the kind of horrible performance other people apparently have.

Video playback and taking calls on a second, larger (40” 4k) display, have improved slightly but are still bad enough that I’d rather move the app to the laptop’s display (32gb mbp mid-2020)

I do think it’s a second-rate app compared to most of Microsoft’s usual offerings - OneNote being a notable exception. Other than the video item above, I’ve found overall performance to be adequate and not remarkable one way or the other.

> Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back.

They are if I build one.

> Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

No, TypeScript is a marginal improvement over JavaScript. It doesn't change the fact that JS with its ecosystem is a dumpster fire because it's unfixably flawed in way too many ways.

There are many languages capable of calling C/C++ functions. I'm a Java kind of person, so I'm waiting for the proper FFI (java.foreign) to be released. Yes, I know about JNA, I use it in one project, but I don't like it. But in the end you can really write a "native" app in anything that's capable of putting the right values into the right registers and jumping to the right address. As far as the user is concerned, the nativeness comes from the GUI toolkit the app uses and the app's responsiveness.

p.s. nice username

My point exactly. It's not like MS lacks desktop programming languages for its own products/OSes.

Indeed. WebView is based on edge which is based on chrome just like electron.

And react is a framework in JavaScript which they are claiming it will replace.

None of this makes sense.

I think what they mean is that there’s been an ongoing effort for Microsoft to migrate Teams from 1) Electron to Webview2, and 2) Angular to React, though as far as I can tell this has been going on for at least a year. Journalist probably just isn’t actually technical, but either way Microsoft wants to hint that this is a significant release and performance can be expected to improve.

As for whether or not Teams will still suck… I guess we’ll find out.

I'm not particularly familiar with Electron and WebView2, but even the Electron blog suggest that WebView2 uses some different IPC formats that can be faster[1]. Considering a big selling point of Teams is as a hub for other Microsoft products, and other plugins, it doesn't seem unreasonable that improvements to the IPC would translate to better performance for Teams, in at least many of the expected usecases.

[1]: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2/#performance-discus...

I didn't know about that blog but as far as I get it they mention the IPC just as an edge case that might give a little benefit and mention overall similar performance in their summary:

> Electron and WebView2 have a number of differences, but don't expect much difference with respect to how they perform rendering web content. Ultimately, an app’s architecture and JavaScript libraries/frameworks have a larger impact on memory and performance than anything else because Chromium is Chromium regardless of where it is running.

Which does indeed make sense, Microsoft is way too focused on adding shiny new features to Teams and too little on its performance.

But anyway I hope it does make a big difference. It's really a source of frustration now.

They are also moving huge portions of the code to react rather than old AngularJS. I'm not sure if they have replaced it entirely or not, but the classic AngularJS was the cause of innumerable performance problems.

Only Win 11? Isn’t everyone on win 10?

Automatically updated on Windows 10 [1] as well.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is...

it is though?

Compare the Teams app vs running Teams on Edge in the web. Big difference.

Shouldn't be too big of a difference, and I personally don't see any improvement - it's still the Angular-based app running in the browser

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