Good riddance. Can microsoft retire windows and mac apps now as well, please?
Seriously, I see zero point of shipping old/buggy chrome bundled with the app (aka "electron") for purpose of accessing some centralized service. PWA is the way to go here, yes.
Teams for Mac refused to let me upload a file this morning, and I learned you can't use the Teams webapp from Safari unless you globally turn off "Prevent cross-site tracking." Yeah, no thanks.
Yeah, that "cross-site tracking" thing is a side effect of microsoft's habit as dumb as inexplicable. Teams webapp (all O365 webapps, really) load from like 7 different domains. I can understand 2 (CDN+API), but that's way too many. No wonder tracking protection kicks in.
that's weird though (in the CDN case) because one of the primary reasons to use another domain is to avoid people sending you cookies because it's useless data for static assets.
Well they will be using Edge Web View 2, their homegrown electron "alternative". What is puzzling is that they didn't even bother to port it to Mac or Linux before choosing to move away from electron.
So edgeview2 is basically windows only for now, and any future port will mean they'll have to maintain multiplatform support. And guess this announcement implies that they won't port it to Linux. But why do away with the "free" multiplatform compatibility of electron? The official reason was for increased performance, but it's hard to see how electron was the bottleneck considering how badly Teams run even compared to your average electron app. I mean Microsoft has built the best performing electron app I've ever used, vscode!
I'm probably missing something though, and I'm sure there are tons of good reasons for going the edge webview route, but it's still pretty confusing to me!
Yep, and edge webview2 uses edge for the most part. Yet there's something specific to the edge webview2 runtime that makes it hard to port even if edge itself is already available on mac/linux. I think it's because it uses some windows specific APIs to expose functionalities that aren't available to regular webviews (maybe the optional process and runtime sharing?)
They were planning on maybe releasing the linux port around the end of 2021, as they were prioritizing the mac port first.
But I don’t think even the mac port has been released yet... So it kind of makes sense for the Teams team (ha!) to just not bother with a linux release if the runtime they are developing on isn't even on the release roadmap yet. Though I guess that makes the switch from electron even more confusing.
Yes, Office nowadays is also heavily invested into using Webviews, and then there is all that buzz about hybrid apps with Blazor.
Every time I watch the WinUI community talk it seems like trying to sell us the platform, after all the mismanagment with UWP.
The sad part is when asked about why features X, Y, Z from Forms or WPF still aren't coming in WinUI, they mostly react as if hearing about the said feature for the first time. That is how well the team knows the frameworks they are trying to replace.
Yeah, I had to research this for work purposes recently and ended up using the Nokia "burning platform" image in the presentation. Microsoft got really badly punched in the face by the failure of Windows Phone and UWP, and they've not managed to backport it successfully to the desktop.
WinUI3 good news: it's open source! You can see it on github.
Bad news: it's only just made 1.0, and because it's on github you can see that the team devoted to it is absolutely tiny.
It's much better than the web version though, which feels like a degraded experience in almost every aspect.
Also what is up with Microsoft's redirect-through-15-domains authentication. Completely unreasonable for anyone that has their browser set up securely.
It's hard to define what "native" even means on Windows these days. For a while, writing WinRT apps in HTML/JS was an officially blessed thing, for example.
At this point you discover that there are at least three different options for C# UI, all of which have significant drawbacks. The performance of a WinForms Teams UI would be fantastic, though.
Everyone I know with a desktop computer installs & uses tons of programs that aren't Chrome. And most of them aren't programmers or other flavors of computer nerd.
The non-nerds also absolutely notice when some stupid Electron chat app makes their laptop hot and takes their battery life from 16 hours to 2.5 hours (ahem, Discord when using voice and/or video chat). Proponents of that tech claim normal users don't notice, but 1) they definitely, 100% do, and 2) more than one might think are even able to figure out which app, specifically, is responsible, not just "my machine's slow and battery's dying fast and I don't know why" (it's usually not exactly rocket science).
Are there actually genuine stats around this?
There's no question there's a class of users these days that have limited use for apps other than their browser (and maybe Adobe Reader for signing/ form-filling PDFs, presumably that will be possible via a browser plugin soon enough too). Those users are presumably not HN readers though (there's at least 20 desktop apps I rely on every day, and another 20 I use weekly or more).
Edit: the Adobe website claims you can do form fill and sign of PDFs from within a browser, but it's never worked for me. Recently had to initial every page of a 78-page PDF, which my fairly beefy machine struggled a bit with (it was truly painful on my partner's lower spec machine), I'm curious how feasible that would be in a browser.
You're kidding, right? There are a lot of Linux users who are screaming for system tray support on many apps. My college is totally on board with Office 365, but I haven't owned Windows in over twenty years. I inherited a Windows desktop in my office, but it mostly stays powered off in a corner.
My system tray has Slack, Discord, Teams, and VLC pretty much all the time. My taskbar often gets rather loaded with how I switch between workflows, and I've already got the Outlook PWA stuck there doing nothing. I was really hoping I could eventually have a native Outlook electron app (I feel a bit iffy installing a third party solution), but instead I'm gaining another app that sits there 90% of the time doing nothing.
Most people didn't have a general-purpose computer thirty years ago. We are going back to that state of things. Those who want one, then and now, will have one.
Seriously, I see zero point of shipping old/buggy chrome bundled with the app (aka "electron") for purpose of accessing some centralized service. PWA is the way to go here, yes.