5 ms·

Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently tha

• hliyan 11mo ago
  I've been wondering whether it's time to reserve browsers for their original purpose of reading documents and move web applications to a different paradigm: perhaps native controls/windows rendered and controlled by cross-platform markup served over the web, running on a "headless" sandbox. Perhaps a bit like React Native, but JIT compiled on the client. Not sure if this already exists. I'd really like to have native UI controls back for applications.
  • hoppp 11mo ago
    The majority of people use web browsers to run applications because every website nowadays is a huge blob of js. Maybe what you thinking is a wasm runtime like wasmer.
  • GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
    https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlreference.html
    • hliyan 11mo ago
      Yes, but QT is precompiled. If QML can be served over the web and JIT compiled locally, that might be closer to what I'm talking about.
  • zahllos 11mo ago
    We could call it Flash. Or Java Applets.
    • hliyan 11mo ago
      You have completely misunderstood the proposal. None of those drive OS native UI widgets through markup and scripts downloaded from the web.
      • zahllos 11mo ago
        Ah no I was just being snarky and not at you. We're all missing (hyper)text markup language as the UI markup layer, plus js. We previously had some kind of alternative "load app from internet" but the runtimes were external (and provided lots of fun security holes). I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.
      • qcnguy 11mo ago
        Java applets drove native widgets in their first iteration. It wasn't markup but that hardly matters, you could have easily slapped some XML over AWT and the difference between a .jar and a .js isn't big. They had to stop because native widgets aren't secure enough.
  • wodenokoto 11mo ago
    Mozilla did that for a while, but ended up giving up on it, and spend 5 years pulling the UI markup out of their code and engine.
  • bonesss 11mo ago
    If they hadn’t fumbled the UI framework, and to a lesser extent the language design, you’re effectively describing .Net’s original role in the MS ecosystem and their play for web dominance. JIT compiling, native graphics, quick and easy online deployment into sandboxes, support for desktop standards like keypresses, etc. It feels like the web ate up the windows desktop experience instead of that experience spreading cross-platform and dominating.
• 23434dsf 11mo ago
  There is a reason they became a multibillion AI-powered behemoth
  • psychoslave 11mo ago
    Do you mean, USA Military–industrial complex? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co... https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/2/article/big-tech-and-the-us-digital-military-industrial-complex.html https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/2/ar... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerberg-joins-the-military-industrial-complex/ar-AA1FPs0r https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerberg-jo...
• philippta 11mo ago
  Your reasoning seems counter intuitive as back in 2012 Facebook rewrote their HTML5 based app to native iOS code, optimized for performance, and knowingly took the feature parity hit. https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-nearly-50-faster-on-ios/ https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-n...
  • usrnm 11mo ago
    It's a tradeoff, different companies are allowed to chose differently or even to change their mind after some time.
  • eptcyka 11mo ago
    Mobile is where the users are. Desktop users are vanishing before our eyes as a market segment.
    • psychoslave 11mo ago
      For some application certainly. Instant messaging of course has many strong point in term of what is to be dealt with. Short messages, photos, quick visios. But to edit large document, visualize any large corpus with side by side comparison, unless we plug our mobile on a large screen, a keyboard and some arrow pointer handler, there is no real sane equivalent to work with on mobile.
      • eptcyka 11mo ago
        Yeah, but the majority of people who would've been daily desktop or at least laptop users some 10 to 15 years ago now make do with a phone. Most people do not need to visualize any large corpus or edit large documents. Similarly, there's a great deal of phone users who's first interaction with computers was via a smartphone.
  • zamadatix 11mo ago
    A 2012 iPhone and a 2025 Windows PC shouldn't be assumed to have the same tradeoff set just because "web vs native" is found in each description.
• maplethorpe 11mo ago
  Windows doesn't even feel like a native Windows app anymore.
  • halapro 11mo ago
    Same could be said for macOS, sadly. Today it looks like a bad render from a teenager in 2012
    • wiseowise 11mo ago
      No, not at all.
    • monegator 11mo ago
      Yeah, i don't really miss frutiger aero, but they lost me when they made the dock flat.
  • calmingsolitude 11mo ago
    This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.
    • jadamson 11mo ago
      Dear God, I hate the way the Windows 11 Start Menu takes slightly too long to open - long enough that I often accidentally close it again. You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it.
      • greggsy 11mo ago
        Never use the start menu anymore with CmdPal in PowerToys. macOS spoiled me.
      • noir_lord 11mo ago
        > You can actually watch CPU usage increase if you toggle it. Not any more, I kept windows 11 around for gaming but I binned the partition, how they managed to make a 7950X3D/7900XTX feel "clunky" is astounding given that I live in KDE which has a reputation for been a "heavy" DE and yet it it feels instantaneously fast in every dimension compared to windows 11.
• brap 11mo ago
  Yeah, I kinda agree with that reluctantly. As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web. So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste. I think we’re not far away from shipping native compiled to Wasm running on Electron in a Docker container inside a full blown VM with the virtualization software bundled in, all compiled once more to Wasm and running in the browser of your washing machine just to display the time. And honestly when things are cheap, who cares.
  • psychoslave 11mo ago
    > And honestly when things are cheap, who cares. It depends what metrics are considered. We can’t continue to transform earth into a wasteland eternally just because in the narrow window it takes as reference a system disconnect reward from long terms effects.
  • skydhash 11mo ago
    Do you think most people have 128GB laptop? It’s more likely to be 8 or 16 GB. The OS os likely taking 4 or more, the browser two or more. And if you add any office applications, that’s another few GB gone. Then how many Electron monstrosities you think the user can add on top of that?
    • likium 11mo ago
      Some PM: users are locked in to our ecosystem; they can't load other apps after ours! /s But for real, the average number of apps people downloading get fewer year over year. When the most popular/essential apps take up more RAM, this effect will only exacerbate. RAM prices have also doubled over the last 3 months and I expect this to hold true for a couple more years.
• GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
  >I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! Let google do it on your behalf.
• otikik 11mo ago
  Well if you are concerned about a resource hog, why are you running Windows in the first place?
• monegator 11mo ago
  I keep fighting with devs that want to use web-everything. Luckily for me, i have the ultimate power so i can just say "Firefox doesn't support that. I don't use chrome. period." But lately i had to start saying Safari doesn't support that so we would lose all iphones, or we can start investigate after we have a working solution. God damn react.
  • prox 11mo ago
    It’s such a mess isn’t it.
  • albinn 11mo ago
    Out of curiosity, what are you proposing instead? I'm currently working in a small company (less than 4 full time employees). And while we can never support native apps for all the platforms I have been wondering what we would use instead of a web app? The advantage of the web app is that it just works, without installation, so there's no friction there. I'd very much prefer a native app, but the overhead is quite high, no?
    • dickersnoodle 11mo ago
      Depends on the app and how it's built. There are ways to architect native mobile apps that give a lot of flexibility, and there are even ways to build both the native and web apps that help with information architecture and UX consistency but you have to design them with that in mind.
• mrtksn 11mo ago
  Why just they don't give the Web UI code to their AI and tell it to convert the code to Windows native code without making mistakes?
  • chistev 11mo ago
    Stop it lol
• Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
  I just don't get it. Well ok, I kinda get it. I get the feeling nobody wants to build native apps anymore, or they don't or can't advocate for it strongly enough, or those advocates aren't in a position where they can make decisions. And from a manager's point of view it seems wasteful to develop the same feature across multiple platforms. And if you look at the numbers it does, but numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now. They don't consider performance or memory usage a factor, and perceived performance is "good enough" for a web app.
  • embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now Ever since UX and UIs started to be driven mainly by metrics and numbers, I felt something started going wrong already. Since then (the decades...), I've learned about "McNamara fallacy" which seems to perfectly fit a lot of "modern" software engineering and product management today: > The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy) [...] involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
  • Ntrails 11mo ago
    I occasionally use whatsapp or discord webapps, but won't install the apps. I don't know for sure which sandboxes the processes more effectively, but I kinda assume the browser is my better bet for protecting myself from crap. Happy to learn otherwise, but might be a datapoint on user behaviour (which could also drive corporate choices).
• bayindirh 11mo ago
  When you use a desktop computer with 32GB RAM and everything you do work-related runs on a giant world-wide datacenter, numbers start to look small. When a developer/company decides to not implement things local and proper way and push it out and be done with it regardless of the resources the product use on the users' system, I mark the company as lazy and cheap, actually. Shoving the complexity and cost to users' is being inconsiderate. Ref: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg
• mgaunard 11mo ago
  The native client had features the web one didn't have, like video calls, so it was actually the one leading features-wise. I guess it's because they decided to make the web client first-class, and instead of maintaining a native client for each platform (windows, mac, linux...) they opted to just serialize all non-mobile uses (which probably aren't that important to them to begin with) to web.