Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

This will never change. All large orgs are this way because at the end of the day, unless its preventing them from making profits, there is no incentive to change it.

Moreover, there isn’t much in the way of alternatives. Everyone likes to hate on MS —for decades this has happened and nothing came of it.

Every year the same debate, every year the same Microslop apologists in the comments, every year nothing ever changes, every year Microslop's market cap keeps groing, every year the same problems

Microslop should have been dismantled decades ago, it's now too late, we need a paradigm shift so that Microsoft no longer affects our society

Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways.

Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design.

Then the web hit and all that died.

Anyone else sit through one of those Microsoft "Project Reunion" and wonder "what the hell is even this?" Microsoft has had a completely confusing UI strategy for years.

> WPF shipped in late 2006. It was remarkable – XAML, hardware-accelerated rendering, real data binding. If Microsoft had made it the definitive answer and invested relentlessly, the story might have ended differently.

Er… The author perhaps never used it? WPF was the worst framework I ever used. It was unbearably verbose, brutally unforgiving, used 2-way bindings that created updating nightmares, ans not the least it was incredibly slow.

WinForms was not the best for sure, but at least you can get stuff done. It was for a long time the right answer to the question the author asked. .Net + WinForms worked well.

When WPF shipped was when the shit hit the fan.

funny thing is, with AI, it's become really easy to put win32 apps together, and they load fast and are super responsive!

Here's how I think Microsoft can get a quick and sustained longterm win in GUI (/s but only partially) -

1. Drop all its GUI stacks apart from legacy Win32

2. Port KDE Plasma to Windows (with aliased bindings to support traditional explorer.exe calls so as to not break user apps)

That's it. There really aren't many significant apps that use the rest of Microsoft's stack apart from Win32 that won't recover from this, and Microsoft itself will just see a massive drop in its own costs with a massive rise in user satisfaction.

s/\sGUI\s/\s/g

Couldn’t someone do a similar story about scripting on windows, and make Jeffrey Snover one of the punchlines?

Starting with Metro every Windows UI framework has been beyond ugly. there's just something so backwards over how nice the UI was in Windows 7, I simply can't understand it.

OLE objects are just like disk images.

It’s web. Just use electron or Tauri.

I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.

Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.

> Dead silence. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we never did answer the question.

> That silence is the story.

These LLMs are just awful at writing.

[dead]

This is a problem with all the OSes.

I'm planing on switching over to QubesOS - way more secure (especially considering rogue LLM-agents) and visually not much worse from windows ... maybe even more cohesive.

WPF was atrocious from the beginning and Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by not basing everything in Windows on it.

Every WPF program was laggy and took ages to even start up (is everyone forgetting hard disk speeds?), partly due to it being managed code. The components didn't feel native either, and the coupling to managed code and garbage collection basically ensured all those would be perpetual issues. Yeah the programming model was beautiful and all, but you're supposedly developing to make your customers happy, not to make yourself or computer scientists happy.

You can see how terrible it would've been to base Windows's shell on WPF by looking at how much users have loved the non-Win32 windows since then.

The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich.

What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-level windows.

Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.