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by lodonnell9213 1335 days ago
I feel Microsoft is in a similar position to it’s windows phones in regards to ARM.

Additionally they don’t have a system like Rosetta 2 to help with translation, a LOT of windows apps are x32/64 based, and there has to be an incentive for devs to make the switch, Apple faced this issue when moving from PPC, they used I believe Carbon to help, and over time took carbon off and forced devs to update to apples current architecture at the time.

Electron unfortunately does seem like the potential way forward for apps, not just because of Windows and their handling of ARM, but it’s also potentially cheaper to develop against as its multi platform, 1Password is a prime example of this, and outside of the hardcore audience like us, they won’t notice the increased resource use of electron.

Microsoft has proven however electron can be good, see Visual Studio Code, plus with the advent of chrome os gaining traction, it’s likely we may head into a web first world, outside a niche subset of users.

4 comments

> and there has to be an incentive for devs to make the switch

Why make the devs switch? It would be much more in the spirit of Microsoft (opposed to the common spirit of Apple and GNU/Linux) to encourage to develop parallelly for ARM, too.

The switch from 16 to 32 bit Windows was "support running 16 bit applications still for a long time". Similarly for 32 to 64 bit Windows (32 bit applications are still perfectly supported). This is in contrast to how how it is typically done on GNU/Linux (distributions typically make it hard to support 32 and 64 bit at the same time) or what Apple typically does (only support the old architecture only for a short time and nudge developers heavily to do the switch).

> Additionally they don’t have a system like Rosetta 2 to help with translation

They do. I'm not sure it covers x86-64 yet, but it does x86.

x86_64 is covered since Windows 11
Electron is on the way out on Windows as they move to WebView2. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...
I like the idea of WebView2, but it seems to be abandonware. They don't fix the most obvious bugs you run into immediately when trying it out. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/229...
It's not abandonware... it's a core component to all of Microsofts desktop apps starting with the new Teams and Outlook.