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It is quite easy to know why.

WinRT is the Windows team final response to Longhorn, but lets do it with COM and C++, which started in Vista.

This is why all major new APIs since Vista are COM based.

So you get an UI framework with reference counting all over the place, and application identity, which is a kind of sandboxing, for the capabilities like in mobile OSes or macOS.

On the UWP subsystem, you get .NET Native and C++/CX, whose runtimes are WinRT aware and can elide those RC calls.

Whereas using WinRT on Win32, means regular .NET and C++, via interop frameworks CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, plain libraries.

So there is no elision, it is AddRef/Release all over the place.

If I recall right, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8 during the 2010's were all developed on low end devices.

Both had huge issues UX wise, specially desktop, but performance and stability was never a issue.

Developers should always test their system on the minimum system requirement that they allow the system to be installed...

I remember I complained about WinUI performance years ago, and they told me at the time that "performance" was not the focus...

The “Apps” app is so bad on macOS too (seems built off of Spotlight?). I’ll type the exact app name and it’ll suggest the one on my phone, an installer in Downloads, etc..

No one dog-fooded that thing.

Explorer.exe is far slower. It was one of the reasons I switched to macos after being a hardcore microsoft fan for many years. explorer would be so slow with fodlers that has a large number of files it would darastically impede my workflow. Macos is far superior IMO than windows when it comes to daily use efficiency.

Finder is one of the worst pieces of software I've used and I have no confidence in Apple ever fixing it, or even being able to in theory.

macos itself is sluggish af

I booted up an OLD imac stuck on 10.something, with an - I can't remember which gen - i5 and only 8gb of ram and I was blown away by how much it FLIES on that ancient hardware - even compared to my M1 Max Mac Studio

Apple Silicon is great. Everything else sucks.

[dead]

A company is a company. For some weird reason techies used to think that they were special, but that time came to an end

Not ironic at all. VP didn't become VP by doing great technical work. They made the VP before them look nice.

Capitalism cannot produce good software, just like it cannot produce good art, or children.

At the end of the day, they find a way to get rid of you if you don’t, even if the VP would endorse your efforts. I understand what you’re saying and hope you understand why it happens, it took me years, and pain.

I mean… that’s kind of the goal really. If you are a leader, you want the people under you to go along with your priorities. That’s a feature, not irony.

I think another way to get to the same effect is to say “A company needs good leaders”.

There's now an Avalonia back-end for .NET MAUI in preview, so they are making an effort on that cross-platform front too. Link: https://avaloniaui.net/blog/maui-avalonia-preview-1

WinUI made sense when windows actually had a proper design guideline, and touch was also the focus. So using WinUI was just easier as the controls were all following the guidelines, and if you wanted to offer a native experience, that was the best choice.

But it's been long gone that time where Windows had a minimum cohesive guideline.

Even if I wanted a Windows-specific UI, I still wouldn't choose WinUI 3. You can ignore it.

At my day job, I choose Windows Forms with Blazor mixed in. That's old reliable Win32 tech + modern web tech, without any modern Windows tech mixed in.

Support for accessibility.

I too don't want to write OS-specific stuff, but here's some counter arguments.

With egui, it's an immediate mode GUI rather than retained mode and that has trade-offs: https://github.com/emilk/egui#why-immediate-mode. It's going to use more CPU (and battery power), there can be jitter and things shifting after the initial rendering, and other stuff. I think egui is very different from most cross-platform and platform-specific libraries.

With .NET MAUI, you're getting native controls, but you're now using a layer that's trying to use native controls on the underlying systems that don't always align completely. A lot of things act mostly the same across systems, but some things don't totally.

With Flutter, your app is going to be larger in part because you're shipping a rendering engine, runtime, widgets, etc. Does it have the look and feel you want? Maybe. That's a bit subjective. Does it handle all the little things correctly? When I'm using an app, I want it to scroll like how I'm used to scrolling working on my system. If you have differently styled buttons, I don't care, but if the scrolling feels wrong, it's going to annoy me. And there's so many little things.

Frankly, one of the reasons why Electron often does well is that a lot of the little things "feel right" because the UI is essentially a Chromium-rendered web page which users are used to interacting with. But that has downsides too - shipping a web browser with your app and the memory usage.

Heck, Qt apps in Gnome or GTK+ apps in KDE can look/feel "off".

And it'll all depend on your ecosystem. Often cross-platform solutions are lacking in accessibility - sometimes completely missing, sometimes half-baked and it works in some parts and not in others or just is janky. Memory usage is often higher. Many little things that make an app feel right might not be there. Many have slower startup times since they're loading a bunch of stuff that native apps don't need to. And it really depends on what approach the cross-platform library is taking to determine what is going to cause pain.

So you kinda have to pick your poison and what's acceptable to you will vary depending on your goals and tastes. Maybe React Native is the way to go for you with lots of native controls available and the feel that provides and the performance and size is acceptable.

If you create a Flutter or Kotlin Compose Multiplatform or AvaloniaUI app and put it on the web, it's not going to feel right as something like HN does. Right-click, text selection, etc. are all going to be different or missing. If you're creating a solitaire game, maybe that doesn't matter - you get desktop and web in one go and it's not a big deal.

But you have to know what you're building to know if the trade-offs being made are good ones. This isn't meant to sound anti-cross-platform, but as someone who has suffered some pain in this area, I guess I just wanted to impart that it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Some times it can still be worth it, but just go in with your eyes open.

Not really. At least not directly.

But it is used to implement various parts of Windows, such as the File Explorer, so any improvements are helpful for general system performance.

If you enjoy calling COM vtables, and doing the reference counting by hand, by all means.

It will need a flashy name, "WinAPI" or something. Just a suggestion

Painful. A lot of the Microsoft interfaces these days are asynchronous and are built around the dev experience of c#/c++ with libraries/runtimes that do a lot of the heavy lifting. So you end up calling functions with ridiculously long names and they aren't like good old win32 calls where you pass in some parameters and you get a result back. Instead you create objects to pass function pointers and data around and who knows when you'll get your result values back.

The photos app also uses webview so yes hopefully

> Will any of this translate to Windows programs like File Manager?

Did you not read the thread? That's literally stated as an explicit goal.

And better not touch C++/WinRT, it makes that experience a few notches up.

It won't happen, already on UWP you had to avoid specific F# code idioms that could generate MSIL that the .NET Native compiler wasn't happy with.

With WinRT on top of Win32, the .NET Native runtime support now lives in CsWinRT, where they also only have C# into account, not even VB as it used to be on UWP side.

Don't worry, once enough people come back, they'll roll back in the ads and the intrusive performance-killing features and the cycle will repeat all over again

Anyone who tried to do serious native windows dev has been burnt so often by Microsoft. I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt with WinUI 3 but I really cannot anymore. Until proven otherwise I expect absolutely nothing to improve meaningfully. It’s extremely sad for those of us who were dumb enough to think Microsoft take on modern GUI would be interesting to follow closely, we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.

Nah, mostly marketing.

The only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.

Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.

We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).

And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.

Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.

Their recent post about explorer performance was “we raise clocks when you launch explorer” rather than an actual fix