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Comment by NetMageSCW | Hacker News Reader

Strong disagree. I think Microsoft’s decision to wrap web apps for the desktop is one of the stupidest they have ever made. It provides poor user experience, uses more battery power and needs more memory and CPU to be performant and creates inconsistencies and wierd errors compared to native apps.

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The increased adoption of webviews has resulted in a death by a thousand cuts effect on Windows 11 performance. The speed bump that comes from going from an up to date Windows 11 install to a up to date Windows 10 install on the same machine is stunning… W10 is much more snappy in every regard despite being nearly identical functionally speaking.

I won’t try to claim that Electron and friends have no place is software development but we absolutely should be pushing back harder against stuffing it everywhere it possibly can be.

> but we absolutely should be pushing back

Every modern desktop uses webviews in some capacity. macOS renders many apps with webviews, GNOME uses gjs to script half the desktop. The time to push back was 10-20 years ago, it's too late to revert now.

They’re still fairly uncommon in macOS, mostly being used in places related to cloud service settings. SwiftUI and Catalyst (iOS bridge) are both much more common than webviews, and AppKit remains ubiquitous.

Meanwhile on Windows major features like the Start menu are written in React.

Worth noting that WebKit webviews also tend to be more lightweight than their Chromium brethren.

> GNOME uses gjs

I don't think gjs is a webview. It uses JavaScript, granted, but binds to a native toolkit, not to DOM and CSS.

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