I want to start a club of people who get very, very annoyed, when people continue spreading misinformation like "Start menu is web based" and "Win11 UI is running on JS"

The OS sucks but please be factually correct when it comes for the reasons ffs

@Sominemo Is it misinformation though? Microsoft started using ReactNative in 2021 and they're just now pulling it out. While, yeah, the ReactNative in the Start menu did map onto native UI elements with UWP XAML, it was still using Javascript (through Hermes, to be fair) to take in updates and build the underlying UWP XAML.

I'm saying this as someone who uses GNOME and likes their GJS shell extensions. ​ I think it is still fair to say that GNOME runs on Javascript, even if it's mostly just bindings for underlying C code. And, frankly, GNOME did a better job of optimizing around GJS than Microsoft did optimizing around Hermes.

@Rusty
1. It is often stated that the pre-K2 Start menu in Windows is web based or even straight up say it is a website. Not a single retail Windows build ever shipped with a browser based Start. Only the Recommended section, the user account flyout and Microsoft account tab in Settings are written in RN. And as we both understand, RN is far from being a browser.

Some even get to state that the Notification Center is web based which is not true either.

@Rusty 2. Yeah you just confirm that it wasn't really the underlying problem. I can only tell that Microsoft's React Native WinUI implementation was clunkier in terms of animations but that's about it.

The primary bottleneck is that WinUI and XAML, unfortunately, still suck. Especially when you try to portal multiple stacks like WinUI3, Win32, and RN together.

@Sominemo @Rusty if it was a website, you could set your wallpaper to it

@Sominemo I mean, Hermes was still a pretty big bottleneck. There's a reason they're shifting away from ReactNative and it's giving Windows 11 some decent performance gains. But yeah, I'd argue that the Start menu did run on Javascript, but it's definitely a far cry from being web-based.

Microsoft really bungled Windows 11 though. Windows 10 was popular enough that they should've taken their time, built out their SDKs, and then get every team on board to use that unified SDK to remake Windows 11 from the ground-up under a centralized toolkit and design language. Instead you have teams who are floundering for a toolkit to use and just kinda, "eh, fuck it, someone make a ReactNative wrapper so we can finally MVP some shit." Such is the nature of quarterly profits I guess, and Microsoft lacks the corporate structure that Apple has where they can really take their time to refine things before they strong-arm every team into using one thing.

I'm frankly surprised that Windows 11 rebuilt as much as it did. I thought Control Panel was gonna be a core part of the Windows experience forever. ​

@Rusty I think they're shifting from RN mostly because it just adds another portal, and these are very inefficient, and there's just very little point in it now.

Even in the current 26h2 Account flyout is still RN tho :P

WinUI is still very bad tho. Explorer is a good example where WinUI is embedded into a Win32 app as a portal, and while the legacy part works solidly and renders in the window ASAP, the toolbar is slow and very glitchy in changing its state

@Sominemo I haven't used Windows 11 in any meaningful capacity so I actually dunno what the current state of WinUI is like ​ Their current design language looks nice in screenshots but I heard it kinda falls apart in the "actually experiencing it" department.

I haven't been in the mood to fart around with secure boot to upgrade from Windows 10 since I don't really use my Windows partition anymore anyway. ​ *laziest fuckin dog*

@Sominemo @Rusty the citation they use for that is that spamming the start menu spikes cpu usage (also happens on kde plasma)

@charlotte @Sominemo This is why Overviews > Start Menus

@Rusty @Sominemo spamming overview almost certainly also spikes cpu usage

@Sominemo oh boy my first job out of college was working at microsoft and for one brief week I was pulled in to help another team modify the control panel for Windows 10.

The windows UI being web-based would've been less horrifying than what was actually shipping. It was a custom internal XAML file with hand-written C++ with kernel-specific MSVC extensions bolted on and a completely bespoke resource compilation step that handled the localization. To this day it is the most horrifying spaghetti mess of C++ I have ever seen.

I don't know what windows 11 is doing but I'm sure they invented some new horrible way of doing things. I despise the windows shell with a seething hatred borne from having gazed into that abominable abyss of a codebase.

@cloudhop @Sominemo well “it uses react native”
but yeah it was so bad that when win11 released you COULD NOT run it in a VM properly bc the start menu took insanely long to work (even LTT and stuff struggled with it), and bc people weren’t immediately trying bare metal for brand new OS, most didn’t realize the problem was nearly fine on direct hardware (smth like requiring gpu acceleration)
it got better over time after people yelled a bunch lol

@6 @cloudhop I think Win11 Explorer toolbar situation is still not good enough even today, I hope they'll fix it properly eventually.

@charlotte @Sominemo shhhh ​

Oh ye also lemme post this thing I've been saying for a while that is my speculation:

Windows 11 added features that could have been part of 10 while also remade some parts poorly, just to make it feel flashy.

It exists only because of Panos Panay three-year tenure as the lead who wanted to show flashy results before he could get an offer at Amazon

I believe Windows 10X would put all the Win32 into its sandbox cleanly but Panay came and flushed all down and instead did a half-baked update to 10, marketed by his hype train as Windows 11, and left two years after its release

And I do believe it's time for Microsoft to develop a sandbox for Win32 apps at least in some way, because currently there's no way for your app to be isolated from any other app that could read your data or inject into your process arbitrarily, unless you want to run as an elevated process (which is a moot point).

I just don't want any executable to be able to read my Chrome cookies or Telegram session key. And I'm willing to give some backward compatibility for it.

Don't say UWP because UWP only sandboxes outwards, any Win32 app can poke into a UWP app, the sandboxing is only effective if everyone is UWP unfortunately

Injecting into other apps and reading arbitrary files should be a permission like it's on macOS imo

@Rairii debatable, while it was a risk, it wasn't looking bad from what we had at that moment

@Rairii yeah I understand where you're coming from but I still think it was far from certain they would go the enforcement path. It didn't even happen with the second attempt on Windows on ARM laptops, where Microsoft had every chance to do it. At least for now they remember the lesson of RT and S mode, not sure for how long.