Microsoft Plans To Build 100% Native Apps For Windows 11 (techspot.com)
- Reference: 0181187376
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/2245259/microsoft-plans-to-build-100-native-apps-for-windows-11
- Source link: https://www.techspot.com/news/111872-microsoft-plans-100-native-windows-11-apps-major.html
> The [3]description stands out at a time when many of Microsoft's built-in tools, including Clipchamp and Copilot, rely on web technologies and Progressive Web App architectures. The company's commitment to native performance suggests that some long-standing frustrations around responsiveness, memory use, and interface consistency could finally be addressed.
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> For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.
[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/111872-microsoft-plans-100-native-windows-11-apps-major.html
[2] https://x.com/RudyHuyn/status/2037234022200598860?s=20
[3] https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/28/microsoft-plans-to-build-100-native-apps-for-windows-11-as-web-apps-ruin-the-os-experience/
Re: (Score:3)
They're not. Electron apps are not accessed via a browser. While it's true you can easily port an Electron app to GNU/Linux, that's also true of a .NET app (which, let's be honest, is likely what they're talking about here, I doubt they're going back to C++ for everything.)
The real advantage of Electron is you can use most of the same code and assets for a website as for an Electron application, which is useful, but given how ridiculously inefficient Electron is, that isn't much of a justification for using
Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score:4, Informative)
Just a few years ago, an app with almost the same functionality as WhatsApp (though it wouldn’t have video or audio, since that wasn’t feasible back then on dial-up or DSL connections) wouldn’t have used more than 50MB even under heavy use. Nowadays, however, an app with the same goals easily exceeds 1.5GB of RAM.
1.5 GB of RAM for an instant messaging app. It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.
And for those complete idiots who keep going on and on about how “memory that isn’t used is wasted memory,” I have two things to say to those clowns:
1) There is absolutely no reason to use 1GB of RAM for a task that you can easily handle with just 10MB of RAM. Just because your computer has 32GB of RAM doesn’t mean you have to use all of it just for your application;
2) Your application isn't the only thing running on the user's computer. What happens if the dozens of processes running on the user's computer all have the same idiotic idea of trying to reserve all the computer's memory for themselves?
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft's apps were bloated pigs long before Electron was a thing. I'm old enough to remember hearing these sorts of complaints regarding Office 2000... and even earlier.
Here we go again.... (Score:4, Interesting)
We've seen and heard this all before at Microsoft. The ebb and flow of industrial monopolists who fail to deliver on their market dominance because their customers and their employees are just NOT HAPPY. This is how it goes with big corporate entities who reign absolute control over their marketing campaigns, but not over reality. So go ahead Microsoft, say whatever you want about the epic failure of how you monetize your operating system and developers. Just remember, some of us have heard this all before, and we know how you really operate. Whatever floats your boat, but we know where this all leads....
Re:Here we go again.... (Score:4, Interesting)
They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.
Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.
Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.
I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.
Re: (Score:1)
> Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake
I'm about 90% convinced they introduced the Ribbon for anti-trust reasons. Here's a change in UI that cannot be fully cloned by competitors (they'd have to make their own custom Ribbons with a custom, non Word, layout to avoid falling foul of copyrights), and which hampers users being able to transfer their skills from Word to, say, Wordperfect (or even Word to Excel.)
Look at the timings, with development occurring at a time when Microsoft had
Re: (Score:2)
That's plausible.
I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what
Re: (Score:2)
Not Happy? Which dwarf are they?
They already exist. (Score:5, Informative)
They're called Portable Executables and end in EXE.
Lots Of Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lot of unsupported assumptions based on an X tweet.
It could just as easily be a new team to fuck up notepad.exe worse than they already have.
Native apps for your own OS (Score:5, Funny)
That's a very radical position.
Re: (Score:1)
HTML/CSS/DOM sucks rotting eggs for doing real GUI's. It was stretched way beyond it's original purpose of displaying static documents, and mutated into rocket spaghetti surgery and still has [1]common GUI idioms missing or done wrong. [reddit.com]
I'm for an HTTPS-friendly GUI markup standard, by the way. Build it from the ground up for GUI's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/10ze9hu/missing_or_defective_gui_idioms_in_htmldom/
Notepad Failed To Launch (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe this partly stems from a recent Microsoft Store outage... that I shit you not... prevented NOTEPAD from functioning.
Yes, seriously.
[1]https://windowsforum.com/threa... [windowsforum.com]
[1] https://windowsforum.com/threads/microsoft-store-outage-0x803f8001-notepad-paint-snipping-tool-failures-explained.398793/
Great but (Score:2)
We all know a Patch Tuesday is going to accidentally reverse them back into Electron-based PWAs eventually
Anyone else miss the days... (Score:2)
...When we called them programs? Or executables? I mean, they do end in .exe for a reason...
Re: (Score:3)
Funny. I thought they all ended in BSOD.
Re: (Score:2)
The halting problem is undecidable.
Native is the new proprietary (Score:2)
No user serviceable parts.
Also, they are pretending to model a brain.. Google car is saying that .. it's wierdly logical, actually kurzweil said we'd do that, but science fiction said so too... proprietary isn't just for Apple anymore, we all make kool now.
Native (Score:1)
Can someone explain what a "100% native app" is, and how it's different to what Windows 11 currently has? What are some examples of "non-native apps"?
Re: Native (Score:2)
Applications written directly using APIs on the platform theyâ(TM)re running on (Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. this is in contrast to progressive web apps (PWAs) or platforms like Electron, which are intended to be more portable, but donâ(TM)t âoefeelâ like the platform theyâ(TM)re running on, even if they hook into platform-specific APIs too.
Re: (Score:2)
A native Windows app uses Windows system libraries to handle tasks like communication and rendering, and relies on operating system methods to draw its interface, and so on. Basically, almost everything you saw being used in Windows 7. Whereas in Windows 11, what at first glance appears to be an desktop application is actually a piece of shit built on Electron or another “web container” whose purpose is to make a web page look like a desktop app. It even works, but with horrendous waste of CPU t
Honestly Unexpected (Score:2)
I thought M$ was moving everything to "web code" so they would only have to maintain a single app architecture across the entire internet to feed their cloud data mining machine and somehow sucker most users into paying for Windows desktop as a thin client for web access.
The idea of returning to real development of native Windows applications means that corporate customers were very unhappy with the results of web/cloud first push.
Soaring RAM prices (Score:3)
Might have something to do with it. There's been a lot of "I've switched to Linux!!" videos on YouTube these days. One of the main reasons quoted (beyond the "Windows is spying on me" valid argument) is efficiency and RAM usage, so that people can get more out of their hardware. A lot of videos say stuff like, "On Windows after boot up, it is using 12GB of RAM, whereas on it is only using 1.7GB! What is wrong with you - Windows 11?!!!"
So more native code might be their way of signalling that they are going to tackle this issue, without admitting that Windows 11 bloat has gotten out of hand?
Re: (Score:3)
My comment should read "on Linux it is only using 1.7GB!" I had a tag of Zorin / Mint / Debian / PopOS.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.
I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.
I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.
And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.
I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash
Finally? (Score:2)
Finally? I’m tired of seeing apps in Windows 11 that are an integral part of the operating system and should therefore be native, but were built with that total, complete, and absolute shit that is “web apps”. “Web apps” only make sense when you really need independence from the OS to the point of accepting a loss of performance and very bad resource usage. Web apps have absolutely no place on where they would never be used on another operating system.
Re: the only reason (Score:2)
Agreed but Apple's app store model is so profitable and self sustaining ide is going to make Microsoft cash
Re: the only reason (Score:2)
Microsoft had/has an app store. Itâ(TM)s never gotten developer or customer traction.
Re: the only reason (Score:2)
It has never⦠donâ(TM)t know why it ate my apostrophe.
Re: the only reason (Score:3)
You're on iOS right? Disable "smart quotes" in keyboard settings will fix it. One day slashdot might vibe code some fixes and join the modern web... or they might not.
developer market share (Score:2)
It is the old Microsoft giving Office away to college students to maintain market share story.
Working on desktop apps which do not ha a HTML based UI is some combination of
- Win32 C++ / C
- .C# NET (VB.net is not in the running)
- Hard to maintain "solutions" built on top of Office
- Third party apps
Microsoft may be admitting to a COBOL moment where finding new developers for Win32/C++ or C#/.net desktop applications is increasingly difficult.
Due to the "In 2 years, I will have marketable skills in ..." statem