Microsoft is removing Maps and Movies and TV from Windows 11
gadgettendency.com
gadgettendency.com
The problem is that Microsoft's implementations suck. Apple's are thoroughly mediocre and that's ok, people who want more can easily get more, but Microsoft is too afraid of cannibalising Outlook and what not to really commit to it.
The TV/movies apps though are bordering on bloatware territory, and that's on both macOS and Win11.
I find it shocking how bad Microsoft is at this. I had my dad, who isn't the most tech literate person, set up on the Windows built-in mail client for a while, which I thought worked pretty okay, a decent default solution. At some point a banner appeared in the App, saying that it was being deprecated in favor of "The New Outlook".
I thought okay, I am personally using Outlook for work on my Mac because of an IT policy, and I found it to be an alright Email client there, and it's one of Microsofts flagship office programs, surely it's gonna be a good experience on Windows right?
It was a complete nightmare, immediately during setup it turned out that "The New Outlook" doesn't support regular IMAP/SMTP Email setups, only account login via outlook.com or google mail (I assume this changed now), so I had to switch him to whatever the "old" outlook is, an extraordinarily convoluted looking piece of software with comically bad user experience, nothing like the Mac version. I genuinely felt bad putting my Dad through this, and it's wild to me that they manage to deliver a so much worse experience on their own platform than on Mac.
From my sources within MSFT, the Outlook codebase is amongst the gnarliest of all in the Office org (though probably not as bad as Word's text layout+flow algorithm...), so it's not really that surprising to me that MS wants to rewrite Outlook instead of continuing to try (seemingly in vain) to refactor the codebase.
Part of me also thinks the problem might be inter-generational: a lot of Gen-Z programmers will have started-off with the NodeJS ecosystem and I imagine they also have less overall exposure to C/C++ - and probably even less experience with Win32/COM/COM+/DCOM, which is the foundation of Outlook.
...still, dropping compatibility with VBA, macros, and COM Automation in a top-tier Office product is definitely a shoot-of-your-own-nose-to-spite-your-face movement by MSFT.
My team around 2014 in Microsoft had problems finding people who wanted to learn COM, I think at one point we literally drew straws for who'd have to learn it.
The Office org has plenty of Win32 C++ people, but even there they are outnumbered now days thanks to all the other platforms.
FWIW I spent a year in the Office org, and while the code is impressive in many ways, doing anything in it is very hard. Not necessarily because the code is bad, it is just that it is big, with lots of history and layers, so doing simple things like getting an image passed around through various parts of the code means jumping through lots of hoops.
The other issue is that now days Windows programming skills are basically non-transferable. It used to be everything ran on Windows, so if you spent some time at Microsoft learning the depths of Win32, you were easily employable as a senior/principal engineer at a ton of other companies.
Nowadays the number of C++ Windows development positions is so low that unless a developer wants to spend their entire life at Microsoft, learning native Windows development is basically wasted time on the resume.
And it's a negative-cycle too: competent (let alone expert) desktop app developers will become a rare-breed as the capabilities of the web platform (i.e. Chromium) keep on growing, year after year. I figure that eventually even the most web-unfriendly and nativist of native desktop applications (e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, et cetera) will end up as WASM blobs rendering to a <canvas> as their UI slowly shifts from whatever in-house Win32 wrappers they have to HTML+CSS. I don't think Tim Berners-Lee could have ever imagined that.
...and this is all because MSFT couldn't put together a consistent and coherent modern desktop development story after VB6 got killed in 2001. If you're some wide-eyed kid in 2012 who wants to make a simple form/window/app that plays fart sounds when you click a button it's 100x easier to do that in HTML+JS than in WinForms/.NET (whereas in VB6 it might even be easier than in HTML+JS, tbh).
The biggest shame here is that as everything moves to the web and off from desktops, we'll lose control over our own data: what incentive would 2033's Adobe have to let you download your own PSD files from the WASM-only Photoshop of the future?
Several years back I needed to prototype a website, so I spent less than a day putting something together in WinForms that had all the functionality I needed. I hadn't used WinForms for several years at that point, but Visual Studio made it really easy to hook up the many, many, data bound fields I had.
Over 2 months later I had a React version of the app working.
Sure the React site was cross platform, and worked on mobile and desktop, but holy cow, 1 day versus 2 months.
WinForms along with Visual Studio, is an amazing combo for productivity.
Woah really? Do they actually use regular chrome-based Electron or do they have a version based on Edge or some Edge WebView system? That's pretty surprising to hear.
My understanding was that the only reason those teams opted for Electron was because they intended to target Linux and/or macOS and/or browser-based users, and didn't want to have to maintain different codebases for each platform (of course this means they ended-up with a non-native UI look-and-feel on all platforms now...). But all of those products I mentioned above definitely needed to target Linux and browser-based users, so I can't get too angry about that move.
...but doing the same for Outlook, a long-time anchor-product for enterprises to buy-into Windows and Office, feels off to me. This does not bode well for the Windows platform as-a-whole if Microsoft isn't even targeting it anymore.
If you have it installed you can see the msedgewebview2.exe processes in Task Manager.
WebView2 is basically the modern equivalent of MSHTML.dll (except it runs the Blink/Chromium code out-of-proc), whereas Electron is a more than just a white-label web-browser: it also bundles NodeJS and it provides a runtime environment with its own platform API (and with NodeJS) so that HTML+JS-based applications can have more-or-less do the same things as native code.
...which I based entirely off the fact the right-click menu used Chromium's non-native-menu-styling - along with MS' history of using Electron elsewhere.
Thank you for the correction!
No idea why… maybe because selling operating systems is dying business?
Though remember XP received a lot of (well-deserved, IMO) flack for its Fischer-Price look, but at least it was (somewhat) customizable, before things got increasingly locked-down and restricted since Vista.
I was there and there were 3 apps what I used from WinXP and Win7 (in any meaningful amount, Charmap and the like, used once in a full moon doesn't count):
Notepad,
Calc,
Paint.
Everything else were 3rd party or updates.
In no particular order:
IrfanView, ACDSee
MPC/VLC (and K-Lite ofc)
ImgBurn/Nero/UltraISO
Office
Adobe Reader/Whatever else I forgot
Corel PhotoPaint 3 (lol, yeah, till I moved to 64-bit Vista), Paint.net, PhotoShop, GIMP
WinAMP, AIMP, Foobar2k
Thunderbird, Sylpheed, The Bat
Edit: Miranda, Skype...
With Microsoft becoming thoroughly centered around services and monetization, they’re increasingly allergic to apps like that. If it’s not actively pushing MS services or showing ads to users they have a hard time justifying spending resources on it.
I switched to Windows Mail and Calendar apps from Outlook a long time ago. They work fine. Both start up instantly. Which cannot be said for Outlook. Occasionally, I'll jump into Outlook to setup some complicated filtering rule, but that's about it.
Sadly, they are getting rid of Mail and Calendar in 2024 and replacing them with Outlook.
1Tb storage, outlook, excel and word for £5 a month approx. Bargain. Chuck another £2 in and my kids and mother all get O365 and 1TB each too.
New outlook is pretty good too (finally).
Why is that ok? Apple's bundled apps are absolute trash and ironically you are prohibited from dragging them thither.
Apple Maps desktop app is garbage and no one uses it when you can pop open Google Maps in a browser. Maybe if I wanted a route to drive me into a lake I'd consider opening it.
Music is a terrible excuse for an iTunes replacement.
These bundled applications just take up valuable space on their perpetually undersized SSDs.
My biggest problem with it is the lethargic rollout of Look Around in the US, so I still use Google for Street View.
> Apple Maps desktop app is garbage and no one uses it when you can pop open Google Maps in a browser.
I use it.
> Music is a terrible excuse for an iTunes replacement.
OK, fair.
Apple Maps takes ~4 sec to open whereas Google Maps takes < 1 sec to render in the browser so no it isn't faster.
4s to render a new Google Maps tab, same machine. (edit: though that probably had a lot of cache-misses, because I almost never use Google Maps—it's likely faster if you use it a lot)
Just tested on my M2 Air, on battery with all my usual apps open in the background, it takes less than a second to open. I've never even used the Apple Maps app on my Mac
(google maps opens in about the same time)
Must still be enough misclicks on 3D paint to keep that around for a few more years.
So much junk apps in Launchpad which are impossible to delete.
Curiously, it isn’t just Apple’s built in apps that can’t be deleted. Edge, Spotify, Firefox, Obsidian, Teams, VS Code, and a whole bunch of Unreal utilities behave the same way.
I think the real issue is that Launchpad is just very, very, very bad.
Sit me down in front of a Mac and it looks like a toddler trying to use a computer for the first time. Years of Windows and Linux on the desktop, none of a Mac. I hope these colored circles in app titles are in the same order as widnows... How the hell do I maximize this window? Where did this window go I just down sized. How the hell does this dock thing work? Where is the menubar?
I know it's easy. Just not the workflow I'm used to. Just got reminded of this from your comment.
It's not that its just weird, it's that its so similar too. Things are almost the same, but the little differences make all the difference. Its UNIX-y so my Linux knowledge transfers over in a lot of areas but anything involving the DE/WM and I am lost.
Most of my computer usage revolves around three programs: Chrome (or any browser really), VSCode, and a terminal. Thankfully these all pretty much work exactly the same way across operating systems these days. I barely go into settings or configure anything as long as its good enough - still use default wallpapers on my laptop and phone!
I know I could switch but yep - that "weird alien environment" is an accurate description.
I would be very annoyed if Apple removed Maps from Mac. I was very annoyed Windows didn’t remove Bing Maps from Windows.
There’s a story here. A company of Microsoft’s size and resources, and which at times had a very competitive product, should not be underperforming so badly. (And they shouldn’t be competing internally with things like Azure Maps)
I haven't paid much attention to what the issues are, as I expect a mapping app to be intuitive enough that I'm not thinking about anything but finding whatever I'm looking for.
I don't think anyone uses it, which is why I don't use it.
Maybe it's just more of a social network thing?
Now, I'm still on Windows 10, but OSR 2.1 landed in August of 1997. And yet, to this day, when I want to eject a jump drive, Windows still won't tell me what is using it. Maybe this is a really hard problem, but come on.
Make the UI consistent? I miss being able to edit the Start Menu. I would love to get rid of those letters denoting the alphabet. I don't really need a "B" just floating there.
Although the only good thing about Bing maps is they sometimes buy newer satellite images than everyone else.
I've noticed nobody ever complains about its data even though it's usually worse than Apple Maps because nobody remembers it exists.
It is amazing what passes for "innovation" today.
Anything that’s there to serve Microsoft more than the end user, gone.