> We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is happening alongside other critical responsibilities like security, platform stability, and support for existing products. Our current focus is on foundational work that unlocks value for contributors and increase transparency. We are aligning this work with Microsoft’s broader business priorities to ensure long-term support and impact.
I don't sense any benevolence in their words. They are just pulling off their resources and dumping the framework on the public, hoping passionate losers will contribute.
_fat_santa · 10m ago
Usually I get why companies release their UI frameworks. I've strongly considered using Atlassian's and AWS's frameworks in the past to build web apps because if it's good enough for Jira/AWS, it's probably good enough for my B2B saas app.
But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but aren't there better options out there for doing this already?
nine_k · 1h ago
Apache Windows when?
More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution.
OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.
echelon · 17m ago
This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units.
I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this?
Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
michaelcampbell · 13m ago
> passionate losers
This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.
But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
paavohtl · 1h ago
This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support, no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you are on your own".
pjmlp · 27m ago
Yeah, WinUI has been a disaster.
tempodox · 37m ago
> hoping passionate losers will contribute.
Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make it usable again.
paavohtl · 1h ago
I am worried about the future of native UI technologies on Windows. Traditionally at least the developers of operating systems have eaten their own dogfood and have at least tried to implement well-performing & visually consistent native applications to serve as an example to others. Windows 11 has largely done the opposite. Windows has had minimal but perfectly functional native email and calendar apps at least since Windows 10 (could have been in 8, never used that). Windows 11 originally shipped with those apps, but they were removed in a later update and replaced with laggy webview wrappers that take seconds to start.
_fat_santa · 6m ago
The issue I see with Windows 11's UI is they seem to focus too much on pushing new apps / features and not enough focus on catching up some of the older tools within Windows. Take for example the Control Panel which is a reskinned version of the same one that shipped with Windows 7. And I'm sure there are tools buried within the OS that probably date back to the 2000/XP days.
Windows 11 looks great if you just look at the press photos and stay a "very happy path" while using it but as soon as you start digging deeper you realize it's like that meme of Homer Simpson with clips on his back.
pjmlp · 24m ago
From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills.
Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place.
That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
nine_k · 29m ago
I won't be surprised if there is an effort to rewrite MSO in something like Dart and WASM, and make it independent from any native toolkits altogether. Yes, to reproduce all of the Excel power, and make it available everywhere as a premium plan of O365.
Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny subset of any current UI toolkit would suffice.
p_ing · 4m ago
Office is a completely separate team divorced from Windows proper. Unless Office deemed it wise to rewrite their UI, they're not going to do so (and it's a frankenstein of a Win32 UI).
Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only libraries to function.
I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office; while not identical in features, they're often good enough outside of BI scenarios or highly complex Excel work.
Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.
pjmlp · 34m ago
No one in Windows development community cares about WinUI, other than those with sunken costs that bought into the WinRT/UWP dream and now are stuck with a dead technology.
Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out.
If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.
bytefish · 4m ago
This. Also DevExpress and Progress Telerik do not invest into their WinUI Controls at all, and that’s a sign they don’t buy into WinUI neither.
WinForms and WPF are currently the only viable frameworks for Line of Business application. I have yet to see a WinUI3 application in the wild.
bee_rider · 2m ago
Dumb question from somebody who doesn’t do gui stuff: is this like a Window Manager, or more like GTK or QT or whatever?
muhehe · 6h ago
I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess.
I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?
deaddodo · 5m ago
There are three UI frameworks in Windows, and only two actively used/developed.
All the other "countless" frameworks are iterations of one of two lines: Win32/Native (WinAPI, MFC, WinRT, WinUI3, etc) and WPF/Managed (Avalon, WinUI2-3, etc). WinUI3 exists to bridge the gap.
cheschire · 5h ago
WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT. WinUI has been around for years.
MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent.
WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3.
Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls and tools, I don’t trust the longevity.
DiabloD3 · 2h ago
They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now a totally normal XAML app.
WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps.
And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.
Also, fun fact: The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it. Rewriting the taskbar made sense, GETTING RID OF SMALL MODE DID NOT, GODDAMNIT MICROSOFT.
Kwpolska · 1h ago
> The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it.
The taskbar that underwent a major redesign in Windows 7 (released after WPF)? Also, that binary is explorer.exe, surely it got rebuilt quite often for new ads. features, and fixes?
noisem4ker · 1h ago
Thanks for the informative comment.
> small mode
I recently noticed that they introduced an option for small icons. Not that it changes much, as the height of the bar stays the same, but hey. Personally I've been fine since they added back the option not to combine buttons unless full.
pjmlp · 24m ago
Hardly an evolution, that is how it is sold, really is something else.
tcfhgj · 1h ago
I think only WinUI2 (deprecated) is an evolution of UWP (uses WinRT APIs).
WinUI3 is something different.
cheschire · 1h ago
WinUI 3 still supports WinRT. It ALSO supports more. It's an evolution of WinUI 2, not just a simple version bump, but also not a completely new tech. It's probably a closer evolution to go from WinUI 2 to 3 than it was to go from Angular 1 to 2.
I think this is completely independent. You can simply use WinRT APIs, because Win32 Apps can use them now.
WinUI3 apps are win32 apps.
> but also not a completely new tech.
Not sure about this.
UWP APIs work out of the box. For WinUI3 you need the Windows App SDK, and it is much slower and heavy than UWP (out of curiosity I created a very simple app and it was fast just a few dozen kbs big)
crinkly · 4h ago
Still writing win32 stuff like it’s 1995 here. We have bits of ATL/MFC hanging out which are throughly abandoned.
I don’t trust WinUI at all.
I was surprised, when I spoke to a former colleague, to find that an internal tool I wrote 25 years ago is still being maintained. Win32 as well.
ffsm8 · 4h ago
Software that solves an actual problem has the tendency to stick around, no matter how much time elapsed.
Just remember, cobol is still in active use, today
DougN7 · 32m ago
MFC support is still in the latest Visual Studio, and it looks like ATL as well.
dh2022 · 22m ago
I was surprised to see ATL/MFC received security updates such as Spectre mitigation. So there is still some support for these 30 year old components.
qcnguy · 5h ago
WinRT came out of UWP I think. UWP was their first attempt to move beyond .NET
DiabloD3 · 3h ago
You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty.
UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Microsoft platform, Windows, XBox, Windows Phone, etc, but also Android and iOS, and also as PWA, and are guaranteed to run identically on any of those platforms. UWP apps must be written a fully managed language that runs on the CLR (ex: C# runs on the CLR, but C++/WinRT does not). UWP also uses the second generation of WinUI-family XAML UIs, which means all UWP apps use completely native UIs, instead of slow non-native Javascript shit in a web canvas.
The WinUI family of XAML UIs started with WPF, and a slightly incompatible version of it also appeared in Silverlight (WPF = WinUI 1.0), then was brought to UWP (= WinUI 2.0), and is now its own stand alone thing that any app can use, managed or not, as 3.0.
WinRT is not an attempt to move beyond .NET, instead it is their way of allowing .NET to natively call code, and make .NET languages first class in Windows.
qcnguy · 1h ago
Yeah but I think when it was introduced it wasn't a thing you could use separate from the rest of UWP. What changed in Win10 was you could use WinRT APIs from regular Win32 apps too. They started breaking UWP up into independent pieces.
Or not. I haven't thought about this stuff for years. Definitely possible I forgot the ordering of things.
cheschire · 4h ago
WinRT was windows 8. Remember the ARM-powered Surface RT had the same branding?
UWP came along in windows 10.
tcfhgj · 1h ago
WinRT was introduced with windows 8, the WinRT APIs still exist in Windows 11.
cheschire · 58m ago
Yep! I was implying it was the same timeframe as windows 8, but I see where my wording could easily have been taken literally.
flohofwoe · 6h ago
They probably started something new and shiny (Now with AI!) and want to get rid of the old baggage without causing too much of a user revolt (all dozens of them) ;)
Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last probably for the next 20 years yet.
badsectoracula · 1h ago
You could also go for wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y but better and cross-platform, though like MFC you can combine it with Win32 API code (almost) seamlessly.
Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.
throw_m239339 · 50m ago
Anybody else using Silverlight in 2025? or WPF? /s
What a freaking giant waste of developer's time...
And you're right, that's why a lot of companies resort to Qt and others, even Electron will last longer( ironically owned by MS themselves...).
criddell · 3h ago
MFC/Win32 + XAML Islands (through the Windows App SDK) is a pretty nice combination for stability and access to new features.
wslh · 1m ago
Microsoft has a long history of releasing numerous UI frameworks: VB, MFC, WTL, Silverlight, WPF, WinForms, and others. Yet despite this abundance, many of the core components Microsoft used in its own applications were never available to developers. They rarely ate their own dog food, and desktop UI development relied on third party components. For the past two decades, native desktop UIs have steadily declined in favor of web-based components, so it's unclear what the real benefit of another native framework would be today.
daemin · 6h ago
Last I evaluated it WinUI3 was a terrible developer experience. The application had to be literally installed on the system to even debug it, which means you end up with a large number of useless start menu entries, not to mention registry entries and such. Another thing was that the example programs crashed when I clicked on a button.
All I want is something simple to work with to make applications for Windows, and so far I'm still using Win32 with WTL.
bloomca · 6h ago
> The application had to be literally installed on the system to even debug it
I think that's because you chose "packaged" application, these apps need to be installed so that capabilities are handled correctly.
To be fair, macOS has the same issue, although they won't show in Launchpad, they still can be indexed by Spotlight.
Springtime · 6h ago
I hope this leads to having a native vertical taskbar, which has been absent in W11 despite being a taskbar feature dating back as early as Windows 98.
Third-party tools have tried to reimplement it but it's either been by bastardizing the native W11 horizontal taskbar to be vertical (eg: Windhawk) or just restoring the old W10 taskbar code (eg: StartAllBack).
wild_pointer · 6h ago
How will making the UI framework open source lead to taskbar changes? For third party contributions in this area, they need to open source the taskbar, not the UI framework.
Timwi · 6h ago
Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an option in its very first version.
0points · 5h ago
The taskbar is a feature of explorer.exe.
The news being discussed is not about explorer being open sourced.
flohofwoe · 5h ago
Is the Windows team even using WinUI for the native Win11 desktop UI? ;)
perching_aix · 5h ago
The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app, so I'm going to hazard a guess and just assume WinUI is built on top of React, and that the Start Menu at least is thus indeed built with WinUI. But it's also clear that some other parts aren't, so who knows what's what. I'm sure there are folks who spent time reverse engineering it all though who do.
paavohtl · 1h ago
The start menu is not a React Native app, but it's actually even worse. Only the recommended section (which is basically recently used files - plus probably advertisements in some scenarios) is. The rest of the start menu is WinUI, to my knowledge.
ok_computer · 47m ago
I cannot stand the latency using a local app. Same with rendering views of local file systems. Frontend reactivity as the expense of responsive performance is the problem with modern user interfaces in my opinion.
Like I’m searching for an installed app. I don’t need news articles about that and never expected a file system ui to be a web portal.
qcnguy · 5h ago
WinUI is its own thing. The React Native stuff just shows that even Windows developers don't want to use WinUI.
Featuring a screencap of an MS engineer's talk from some React conference, yes.
madeofpalk · 5h ago
It's confusing what exactly 'WinUI' is, but does Explorer looks WinUI-ish. Parts of it at least.
e4m2 · 4h ago
Explorer uses XAML Islands. Parts of it are WinUI, while the rest is still Win32.
tomovo · 1h ago
They need to feed it to all the LLMs to get help keeping it from falling apart.
They could go back to Win32 + WinForms and everything would be fine.
bluescrn · 55m ago
If only they'd open source Windows Explorer and the taskbar/start menu, rather than resisting peoples attempts to customise them through other hackery.
mellosouls · 57m ago
Actual - and rather different - title (as borne out by reading the article):
Microsoft is taking steps to open-sourcing Windows 11 user interface framework
zerr · 5h ago
Even for Windows-only GUI software, it is much safer and sane to use cross-platform frameworks such as wxWidgets and Qt Widgets.
orphea · 2h ago
And if you're on .NET, something like Avalonia.
feverzsj · 7h ago
So, they gonna abandon it soon?
sirwhinesalot · 6h ago
It was abandoned from birth.
ashoeafoot · 17m ago
Could microsoft still build windows today?
wopwops · 1h ago
Does this mean that we will be able to get the Quicklaunch toolbar back?
elygre · 6h ago
I won’t benefit from this. At the same time, I cannot see a single bad thing about it, so I’m surprised about all the negative energy.
sirwhinesalot · 5h ago
The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned, open sourcing it won't make any difference.
It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF.
People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
dlachausse · 3h ago
Native UI is effectively dead outside of Apple’s platforms, and even there it’s hanging on for dear life. HTML, CSS and JavaScript won the cross platform toolkit battle.
sirwhinesalot · 2h ago
Sadly yes. And all the platforms are to blame. Microsoft and their 1000 half-working frameworks made writing a wrapper that was any better than wxWidgets impossible.
But also Apple "totally not deprecating" AppKit and pushing everyone to the mess that is SwiftUI, Gnome breaking backwards compatibility as a sport, and Qt messing around with QML, meant "native UI" became quicksand.
Even going HTML, CSS and JavaScript wouldn't be too bad if the browser engines provided by the OSes were any good, but it took Microsoft giving up and switching to rebranded Chromium as a browser for Windows to provide a usable one in WebView 2.
WebKitGTK is also terrible compared to the macOS version of WebKit, which hurts projects like Wails and Tauri. So everyone bundles a freaking copy of Chromium with their applications.
I should have studied mechanical engineering.
cosmic_cheese · 4m ago
On the Apple side of things, AppKit and UIKit work as well as they always did, and they’ve been less pushy about SwiftUI lately probably because they realized that the old toolkits aren’t going away any time soon.
For Qt, the hard-coupling of C++ or Python for Widgets and Quick being JS-centric haven’t done it any favors. C++ and Python are fine, but not everybody wants to write either, and most people interested in writing JS are going to gravitate towards front end web stacks over anything else.
I think that for a cross platform desktop UI toolkit to see any degree of long term success, a high degree of bindability is non-optional even if it’s most capable when used with its native language. The toolkit needs to meet developers where they are, and that means being usable in the language of their choice.
Sammi · 1h ago
The most important thing the web standards get right is their insistence on never ever breaking backwards compatibility. HTML, CSS, and JS accumulate a lot of cruft, but they do move forward into the future without leaving anyone behind.
kstrauser · 45m ago
Flash was a web standard, albeit a closed one. Good luck opening a site with it today.
The web has continually added and removed features. It is absolutely not perfectly backward compatible. It’s not even close.
sirwhinesalot · 35m ago
Flash was never a web standard, what are you talking about? It was a commercial browser plugin developed by Macromedia and later Adobe.
kstrauser · 22m ago
True, and at one point it had an installed base of like 90% of all browsers, and was incredibly common on all kinds of websites.
I said it was a closed standard, and I stand by that.
donutshop · 49m ago
"We laid off most of the team despite record profits and need free labor to maintain what remains"
dist-epoch · 37m ago
Confused, the Win 11 UI framework, Electron, is already open source.
bloomca · 7h ago
I really hope they do and the rendering engine is decently decoupled, I'll give a try building a framework on top of it.
I wish all platforms gave access to their rendering engine similar to DOM on the web, imo SwiftUI/WinUI (or WPF, but they are very similar) are not that good.
Haven't built anything native on Linux, though, no idea how good those are.
jamil7 · 6h ago
What do you mean by access? APIs to program against or fully open sourcing the rendering engine? Because you can mix SwiftUI with a few different rendering frameworks at varying abstraction levels that it itself renders to (AppKit, UIKit, Core Graphics, Metal etc.)
bloomca · 6h ago
Basically I want an API available to build my own SwiftUI. Definitely not on the Core Graphics level :)
But good point, I actually think AppKit might be a good abstraction level. I'll play with it a bit and see if I can abstract it behind a good component model.
genter · 6h ago
What's wrong with Skia? Chrome, Firefox, and OpenOffice all use it, and it works on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Android.
bloomca · 6h ago
Nothing wrong with it, just want something a bit higher level and ideally with at least some native components/styles.
incrudible · 6h ago
It is a ton of C++ for what is essentially something that an OS like Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS or the browser would provide anyway. Apps that use it ship with a substantial minimum amount of bloat, e.g. Flutter for web.
BoorishBears · 7h ago
Seasons may come and go, but one thing will never change.
Windows and an absolutely baffling array of UI frameworks with various pitfalls, uncertain futures, and no clear winners.
(honorable mention to WinForms though.)
politelemon · 7h ago
And I still give them points for trying, a rarity among the tech giants.
jiggawatts · 6h ago
My analogy is every Microsoft UI framework was almost completed in the sense of someone being almost pregnant.
A framework that has just one show-stopper missing feature or problem is... unusable. You can't embark on a large, complex application development journey if you even suspect that you'll be painted into a corner.
For example, many of WPF-derived frameworks had atrocious performance, with fundamental mistakes in their design that made them incompatible with list virtualization. It wasn't until they had to eat their own dogfood and use WPF for Visual Studio that they started fixing these issues.
Win UI 3 meanwhile dropped all support for HDR, wide-gamut, etc... going backwards to SDR sRGB only in an era where all mobile phone manufacturers were starting to standardise on OLED HDR displays. The logic behind this decision? Microsoft wanted a UI framework that is "mobile compatible"!
brokencode · 1h ago
I just have to wonder.. why after decades can Microsoft not get this right? I’d love to hear insider stories about what’s going on here.
Rochus · 5h ago
How was it implemented? C#? C++?
e4m2 · 4h ago
C++
1970-01-01 · 1h ago
What we wanted: Win7 UI open source
What we got: Win11 dumpster fire, free for everyone to fix
rvba · 5h ago
So will we be able to have more than 11 programs on the taskbar without them being compacted?
Or a 2 row taskbar?
So I can easily switch between my 40 windows open? What is good for productivity?
ycuser2 · 4m ago
And hopefully the customizable quick start bar... I lost hope in Windows but have to use it.
hyperbolablabla · 7h ago
I'm sure it'll be really user friendly(!)
bobsmooth · 6h ago
What "UI framework"? Windows is a Frankenstein's monster of different UI elements.
Disposal8433 · 1h ago
I haven't used Windows for a long time but I'm sure they still have the moricons.dll of Windows 3.1 somewhere.
bloomca · 6h ago
Rendering engine + set of native components + APIs to make your own components.
Windows definitely shot themselves in a foot with building multiple renderers while building them on top of each other.
> We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is happening alongside other critical responsibilities like security, platform stability, and support for existing products. Our current focus is on foundational work that unlocks value for contributors and increase transparency. We are aligning this work with Microsoft’s broader business priorities to ensure long-term support and impact.
I don't sense any benevolence in their words. They are just pulling off their resources and dumping the framework on the public, hoping passionate losers will contribute.
But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but aren't there better options out there for doing this already?
More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution.
OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.
I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this?
Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.
But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make it usable again.
Windows 11 looks great if you just look at the press photos and stay a "very happy path" while using it but as soon as you start digging deeper you realize it's like that meme of Homer Simpson with clips on his back.
Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place.
That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny subset of any current UI toolkit would suffice.
Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only libraries to function.
I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office; while not identical in features, they're often good enough outside of BI scenarios or highly complex Excel work.
Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.
Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out.
If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.
WinForms and WPF are currently the only viable frameworks for Line of Business application. I have yet to see a WinUI3 application in the wild.
I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?
All the other "countless" frameworks are iterations of one of two lines: Win32/Native (WinAPI, MFC, WinRT, WinUI3, etc) and WPF/Managed (Avalon, WinUI2-3, etc). WinUI3 exists to bridge the gap.
MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent.
WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3.
Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls and tools, I don’t trust the longevity.
WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps.
And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.
Also, fun fact: The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it. Rewriting the taskbar made sense, GETTING RID OF SMALL MODE DID NOT, GODDAMNIT MICROSOFT.
The taskbar that underwent a major redesign in Windows 7 (released after WPF)? Also, that binary is explorer.exe, surely it got rebuilt quite often for new ads. features, and fixes?
> small mode
I recently noticed that they introduced an option for small icons. Not that it changes much, as the height of the bar stays the same, but hey. Personally I've been fine since they added back the option not to combine buttons unless full.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/platf...
I think this is completely independent. You can simply use WinRT APIs, because Win32 Apps can use them now. WinUI3 apps are win32 apps.
> but also not a completely new tech.
Not sure about this. UWP APIs work out of the box. For WinUI3 you need the Windows App SDK, and it is much slower and heavy than UWP (out of curiosity I created a very simple app and it was fast just a few dozen kbs big)
I don’t trust WinUI at all.
I was surprised, when I spoke to a former colleague, to find that an internal tool I wrote 25 years ago is still being maintained. Win32 as well.
Just remember, cobol is still in active use, today
UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Microsoft platform, Windows, XBox, Windows Phone, etc, but also Android and iOS, and also as PWA, and are guaranteed to run identically on any of those platforms. UWP apps must be written a fully managed language that runs on the CLR (ex: C# runs on the CLR, but C++/WinRT does not). UWP also uses the second generation of WinUI-family XAML UIs, which means all UWP apps use completely native UIs, instead of slow non-native Javascript shit in a web canvas.
The WinUI family of XAML UIs started with WPF, and a slightly incompatible version of it also appeared in Silverlight (WPF = WinUI 1.0), then was brought to UWP (= WinUI 2.0), and is now its own stand alone thing that any app can use, managed or not, as 3.0.
WinRT is not an attempt to move beyond .NET, instead it is their way of allowing .NET to natively call code, and make .NET languages first class in Windows.
Or not. I haven't thought about this stuff for years. Definitely possible I forgot the ordering of things.
UWP came along in windows 10.
Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.
What a freaking giant waste of developer's time...
And you're right, that's why a lot of companies resort to Qt and others, even Electron will last longer( ironically owned by MS themselves...).
All I want is something simple to work with to make applications for Windows, and so far I'm still using Win32 with WTL.
I think that's because you chose "packaged" application, these apps need to be installed so that capabilities are handled correctly.
To be fair, macOS has the same issue, although they won't show in Launchpad, they still can be indexed by Spotlight.
Third-party tools have tried to reimplement it but it's either been by bastardizing the native W11 horizontal taskbar to be vertical (eg: Windhawk) or just restoring the old W10 taskbar code (eg: StartAllBack).
The news being discussed is not about explorer being open sourced.
Like I’m searching for an installed app. I don’t need news articles about that and never expected a file system ui to be a web portal.
What's the source for this?
They could go back to Win32 + WinForms and everything would be fine.
Microsoft is taking steps to open-sourcing Windows 11 user interface framework
It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF.
People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
But also Apple "totally not deprecating" AppKit and pushing everyone to the mess that is SwiftUI, Gnome breaking backwards compatibility as a sport, and Qt messing around with QML, meant "native UI" became quicksand.
Even going HTML, CSS and JavaScript wouldn't be too bad if the browser engines provided by the OSes were any good, but it took Microsoft giving up and switching to rebranded Chromium as a browser for Windows to provide a usable one in WebView 2.
WebKitGTK is also terrible compared to the macOS version of WebKit, which hurts projects like Wails and Tauri. So everyone bundles a freaking copy of Chromium with their applications.
I should have studied mechanical engineering.
For Qt, the hard-coupling of C++ or Python for Widgets and Quick being JS-centric haven’t done it any favors. C++ and Python are fine, but not everybody wants to write either, and most people interested in writing JS are going to gravitate towards front end web stacks over anything else.
I think that for a cross platform desktop UI toolkit to see any degree of long term success, a high degree of bindability is non-optional even if it’s most capable when used with its native language. The toolkit needs to meet developers where they are, and that means being usable in the language of their choice.
The web has continually added and removed features. It is absolutely not perfectly backward compatible. It’s not even close.
I said it was a closed standard, and I stand by that.
I wish all platforms gave access to their rendering engine similar to DOM on the web, imo SwiftUI/WinUI (or WPF, but they are very similar) are not that good.
Haven't built anything native on Linux, though, no idea how good those are.
But good point, I actually think AppKit might be a good abstraction level. I'll play with it a bit and see if I can abstract it behind a good component model.
Windows and an absolutely baffling array of UI frameworks with various pitfalls, uncertain futures, and no clear winners.
(honorable mention to WinForms though.)
A framework that has just one show-stopper missing feature or problem is... unusable. You can't embark on a large, complex application development journey if you even suspect that you'll be painted into a corner.
For example, many of WPF-derived frameworks had atrocious performance, with fundamental mistakes in their design that made them incompatible with list virtualization. It wasn't until they had to eat their own dogfood and use WPF for Visual Studio that they started fixing these issues.
Win UI 3 meanwhile dropped all support for HDR, wide-gamut, etc... going backwards to SDR sRGB only in an era where all mobile phone manufacturers were starting to standardise on OLED HDR displays. The logic behind this decision? Microsoft wanted a UI framework that is "mobile compatible"!
What we got: Win11 dumpster fire, free for everyone to fix
Or a 2 row taskbar?
So I can easily switch between my 40 windows open? What is good for productivity?
Windows definitely shot themselves in a foot with building multiple renderers while building them on top of each other.
winui3 was abandoned the moment it was conceived.