Cringe. There is no other word for it, this makes me cringe. It’s embarrassing.
Moving to WinUI 3 a big step forward but it’s embarrassing that they implemented Win11 with web UI frameworks in the first place instead of using one of their several actively maintained in-house toolkits. WinUI would’ve been okay. UWP/WPF would’ve been fine. WinForms would’ve been unexpected but still better than web UIs. Win32 has been a reliable and performant workhorse for decades. Or MFC if pure Win32 is too obtuse.
They went with web frameworks because it’s cheaper to hire some random web devs instead of training people on toolkits suitable for desktop programming. Now they have to hurriedly undo that because what they delivered was so bad that people look at the state of Linux desktop UIs and say: “Hmm, this looks more professional and intuitive.” That’s honestly impressive but it’s not an achievement.
They went with web frameworks because it’s cheaper to hire some random web devs
or because it’s easier to get AI slop code for it
Nah it actually started back with windows 8 and the metro UI when they fired a bunch of native devs and folded the mobile divisions into working on windows
Mobile slop was slop before slop was slop