[robertknight]

This is not unique to X. Windows for example uses the same kind of "HWND" object for buttons as for top-level windows. Windows doesn't have the same client/server overhead as X though.

In Qt, there is an option to use either native windows for individual widgets or "alien" windows, in which only the top level widget is a native window - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qwidget.html#native-widgets-vs-alien-....

[Stratoscope]

Traditional Microsoft Windows apps do have one oddity here: the "client" and "non-client" areas.

The non-client area included stuff like the title bar, min/max/close buttons and system menu icon, and resizing borders.

The client area was where your app would put its content, including any child windows like buttons and list boxes.

Many of the window messages for the client area had corresponding non-client messages, for example WM_PAINT and WM_NCPAINT. All of these messages would arrive in your GetMessage/DispatchMessage loop, but you would generally ignore the WM_NC versions and DispatchMessage would send them to the Windows code for default processing.

OS/2 Presentation Manager took a more elegant approach here (but probably slower). You had one main window and everything inside it - both "client" and "non-client" stuff - was child windows.

So you just had one set of messages for everything, no WM_NCxxxx messages at all. The client area was a child window, with other child windows for the non-client doodads.

[iforgotpassword]

The application not being forced to handle the title bar and its buttons, but getting the default one for free. I wonder when the GNOME/mutter people will discover such a novel concept (regarding Wayland).

[yxhuvud]

They are very intentionally choosing to put that responsibility in the client. It is very irritating and their choice (as opposed to other compositors that support the decoration protocols) is one of the bigger sources of Wayland fragmentation.

[phatskat]

Honestly I haven’t touched Linux in a desktop sense in years, and the drama around Wayland/window trim makes me miss it lol

[pcwalton]

Windows works just like GNOME here: decorations are client side and are drawn in user32. dll.

[okanat]

Um not really.If the application gets stuck, Windows Desktop Window Manager slaps its own titlebar on top of the window, ignoring all client decoration. You can still move it or close it.

On GNOME, if the application gets stuck you have to kill it by other means.

[fragmede]

Oh god, WM_PAINT. that takes me back. I'm not convinced that css is better, given how many lives were wasted trying to get a responsive 3 column view to work before flex box, but here we are.

[ale42]

And something behind still needs WM_PAINT to display the thing styled by CSS... at least if it's displayed on a Windows machine

[ogurechny]

The distinction probably helped with management of busy or hung processes which didn't process window messages. Window system internals probably yank the non-client messages from the queue, and do the default processing to make window movement and closing with X button work reliably.

[silon42]

Yeah, this was a big problem with OS/2 and why I don't like to use client side decorations on Linux.

[ahartmetz]

It's interesting that someone already tried that long before Wayland and Gnome, with the predictable result...

[Dwedit]

Non-client area also applies to controls (non-top-level windows) as well. For example, the border on a text box is part of the nonclient area of that window.

[barrkel]

One object receiving different messages for painting its innards vs its chrome isn't particularly ugly. Most apps don't want to customize the chrome so they'll let the base class handle those messages, but the option is there.

Windows is kinda smalltalk-like in its window message system.

[unnah]

Now that modern browsers draw tabs and other stuff in their title bar area, does that mean that they actually handle WM_NCxxxx messages?

[flohofwoe]

Those are most likely windows which have been created without window chrome. The Win32 CreateWindowEx() function has style flags which allows all sorts of modifications down to "just give me a featureless rectangle to draw into". That's a really nice thing about the Win32 window system, it gives you a fully featured default window and then you can gradually override the defaults as needed.

[okanat]

I think they actually don't use that flag but use this function here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/Dwmapi...

The feature is from Windows Vista and it is still the basis of acyrilic effects on 11. The feature is explained in this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dwm/customfr...

[raphlinus]

Good further reading on this change is "Windowless controls are not magic"[1] from Raymond Chen, and the followup "Windows are not cheap objects"[2]. It's a fascinating tradeoff space. I think fine-grained windows worked reasonably well on limited hardware but did not scale to super-rich applications like web browsers, or a more sophisticated imaging model where widgets need to be composited with alpha-transparency.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050211-00/?p=36...

[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050315-00/?p=36...

[pillusmany]

90s apps used these Windows handle controls and it was not a performance problem. On computers 100 slower than today and with 1000 times less memory.

BTW, the current Windows Task Manager still shows the total HANDLE count on the CPU page.

They were not used in apps with complex UIs because native controls were hard to skin and didn't work very well when their size was very small (as complex UIs tend to need)

[Someone]

> 90s apps used these Windows handle controls and it was not a performance problem.

That depends on the overhead per window. Microsoft Windows could use nested windows because it had separate Graphics objects to store such things as the current drawing pen, its position and the current font to use for drawing (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/gdiplusg...)

In comparison, on the classic Mac every window had a GrafPort that defined a boundary region, a clipping region, the current pen position, size, drawing pattern, etc.

The Mac could have such heavy-weight window objects because it didn’t nest windows. Instead, each window had a single list of controls that were much lighter-weight.

my gut feeling says separating the drawing state from windows as in MS Windows is the better choice, but I also think having separate entities called “windows” and “controls” as on the Mac is the better choice.

(its documentation is ‘less than stellar’, but it appears GrafPort still exists: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applicationservice...)

[skissane]

> (its documentation is ‘less than stellar’, but it appears GrafPort still exists:

GrafPort is part of QuickDraw, almost all of which was removed in 64-bit macOS. (A handful of QuickDraw functions survive, but they can't actually be used to do drawing, just to manipulate Point/Region/etc data structures.)

From what I understand, this struct/typedef remains in the headers to help with compiling legacy code–but all the APIs which take it as an argument have been removed, so it is essentially a useless vestige.

[bitwize]

> my gut feeling says separating the drawing state from windows as in MS Windows is the better choice, but I also think having separate entities called “windows” and “controls” as on the Mac is the better choice.

I like to sum up the difference between Mac and Windows thusly. Probably glossing over a bunch of stuff but still:

* Steve Jobs toured Xerox and came away with an idea, and a fairly shallow one -- the windowed, mouse-driven, document-centric interface. This is what he then had his team implement in the Lisa and Mac. As implementations go, it was really good and it looked good, but it was really procedural Pascal code beneath. (You had to handle window moving and resizing yourself in early Mac OS. There were library functions to help, but you had to code all that into your application's main loop.)

* Microsoft, at right about the same time, was hiring guys out of Xerox PARC itself -- guys like Charles Simonyi -- and they brought with them a whole passel of ideas, not just concerning interfaces but also software design, things like objects and message-passing. That's why Windows could do things like handle the move and resize drag actions, and then just post WM_MOVE or WM_RESIZE to the target window. Windows were objects -- members of classes, even, and could receive messages.

Granted, Windows couldn't run in 128K -- and Jobs would pivot completely with NeXT and deliver an object-oriented desktop based on Smalltalk grafted onto C (Objective-C), but initially it seems Apple were trying to build a cheaper, more user friendly Xerox Star and Microsoft were trying to get as much of the Smalltalk environment as would fit in a PC without requiring devs to learn a new language.

[twoodfin]

FWIW, Steve agreed with your assessment. One of my favorite Jobs quotes:

I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. And so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind and they showed me what they were working on. And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a network computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all network using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that.

I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.

One way to describe NeXT is Steve returning to the two things he missed @ Xerox.

[nxobject]

I think the tradeoff with the Toolbox is that positioning controls with relative coordinates, and updating views when scrolling etc, is a huge PITA since you have to do it in application code – for example, I'm not aware of many classic Toolbox applications that had bottom window status bars before that required relative positioning. A few early applications just assumed 512x342 fullscreen (i.e. MacPaint.)

On the point of GrafPort still existing – Carbon was insanely backwards source compatible until QuickDraw was deprecated in the transition to 64-bit! [1] Conservatively-written 80s Toolbox code would work with some switching around of headers, and shimming getting/setting members of structs with functions.

[1] https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...

[Someone]

> for example, I'm not aware of many classic Toolbox applications that had bottom window status bar

I think that’s more either because they yet had to be invented or because giving up 16 or so pixels on a screen (the menu bar was 20 pixels high, IIRC) that’s only 342 pixels high wasn’t desirable.

> A few early applications just assumed 512x342 fullscreen (i.e. MacPaint.)

I think MacPaint can be forgiven for that. It was a miracle that it ran on a Mac with 128kB RAM.

An application on that machine had about 28kB free for a program. MacPaint allowed you to edit a 50kB bitmap, double-buffering the screen to avoid flicker, with full undo.

(And yes, paging to floppy disk isn’t fast. It did work, though)

[adzm]

Note the HANDLE count is kernel objects; windows and graphics objects will show as USER and GDI respectively. Each of these has its own heap and limits.

[bitwize]

> 90s apps used these Windows handle controls and it was not a performance problem.

For a while there, at least on Windows 3.1 and before, possibly some Windows 9x versions -- you had a GDI heap and USER heap of 64k each (one 16-bit x86 segment). If you allocated too many HANDLEs, you could blow one of these heaps. So it still made sense to be judicious about how many windows you created. Most Web browsers and word processors, for instance, drew their documents in the client area and did not use subwindows to position text elements.

[dspillett]

It wasn't usually a performance problem because before you hit that point you hit a more simple resource problem: up to and including Windows 95¹, GDI had significant 16-bit internals (at least partly, I assume, for compatibility with older apps), and there was a limit of 16,384 HWNDs and so that 16,384 active objects of any type that needed a HWND. This could be a noticeable limit if running a number of certain apps at once anyway, but some apps had a habit of "leaking" handles making it more common to run into.

IIRC this limit never applied to the NT family (NT, 2000, XP, …).

--

[1] I can't remember if this was resolved at all in the 98 releases, I imagine not

[grumpyprole]

I remember running into this quite often. Apps would fail to draw completely and malfunction.

[Narishma]

Do you know why they made those handles public instead of private to each app?

[dspillett]

In the early days there was little need, nothing big enough to need that many would fit in the rest of the machine anyway.

Also they were global so apps could communicate - the message queue was based on sending things to window handles, and the more advanced IPC methods like DDE and so forth were built on that. It is also how anything that interested with the task list or interacted with the desktop (adding decorations to windows etc.) functioned. This doesn't work if local handles can conflict with those in the other app.

The amount of things that depended on HWNDs working this way is probably a significant part of why large chunks of GDI remained 16-bit in Windows95 despite things like the limit of 16,384 handles being an issue you could run into relatively easily by that point - too many existing apps & tools would have broken otherwise and limited people's desire to upgrade from 3.x.

So a combination of "no point introducing extra complexity, at least early on", "the global pool is actually useful", and "once it was done that way, it was very hard to refactor without breaking compatibility with much of the existing application base".

I think the compatibility layers on later versions did start separating the apps more, once breaking things was less of an issue (new versions existed that were directly compatible with newer APIs) so segregating the apps for stability reasons won out over being quite as backward compatible.

[lmz]

Windows can be interacted with cross process e.g. send an event to a window owned by another process, have a child window owned by another process etc.

[stouset]

> They were not used in apps with complex UIs because native controls were hard to skin

Every time I’m forced to use Windows I’m blow away by the clownishness of every application deciding to skin its own custom windowing controls.

This started happening some time around XP, I think?

[jeroenhd]

It definitely started before: one of the reasons beta versions of Windows XP had a completely different theme was to prevent application developers from trying to implement the XP theme in some weird, unofficial framework and create broken and inconsistent looking applications by rendering the XP style themselves. As XP wasn't finished yet shipping every real iteration would've probably only caused more of these inconsistencies, so I think shipping the real theme close to release date was the right move.

If applications used the theme APIs, they'd run fine on both beta and production versions of Windows. If applications tried to render bitmaps over title bars and such, they'd look weirdly out of place, because the real theme was extremely different.

Unless you preferred the beta Windows XP style, of course, which some people did. I think there were a few hacks you could do to get the beta theme working on release versions of Windows.

[ogurechny]

> prevent application developers from trying to implement the XP theme in some weird, unofficial framework and create broken and inconsistent looking applications by rendering the XP style themselves

That certainly did not work, as billions of applications, including big ones, were using third party “XP-like” and “XP with some twist” skins both in Windows 9X and XP builds.

Microsoft very likely wanted to have some control over commercial skinning market (and make people making those broken things care about compatibility) — alternative themes were supposed to be available to users after being signed by Microsoft. However, you can count the number of those themes on one hand, because others' response was “providing a patched version of uxtheme.dll for each update”.

The other problem was that fashionable XP interface features like colourful side panels in Explorer and Control Panel were windowless controls made with internal layout engine, and neither was available to the public. So the only option was to re-implement those things more or less faithfully, which was done by many developers of commercial UI libraries.

[jeroenhd]

That only happened after the official release, and of course Microsoft couldn't stop anyone from taking a screenshot of the title bar and buttons.

I'm not sure if they wanted to sell themes, really, all theming I've ever seen them sell was based on Windows Media Player and I don't think they did a lot of business in that. Most of the themes were free and the ones that cost money often came back for free a while down the line.

The explorer panels didn't seem to catch on outside of Windows Explorer. Most apps that implemented the bar also didn't seem to make good use of it, in my opinion. Microsoft Office had it, but it always made the screen feel a bit crowded in the way they stacked it with controls and panels, while being completely empty at other times. I think the panel made sense for explorer, but not much elsewhere.

I do wonder if there was an API for the side bar if you used the CLSID explorer interface.

I think Microsoft should've exposed the control, but at least they released a lot more native controls when Vista came around.

[flohofwoe]

Windows isn't any special compared to Linux or macOS though is it? IME 90's MacOS was most known for funny looking apps, the custom UI thing probably started with Kai's Power Tools:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Kai%27s+powertools+screensho...

[KerrAvon]

That's not true; apps with non-native UI were usually scorned by Mac users. KPT and other Metatools or (whatever they called themselves that week) stuff was an exception.

[amluto]

I remember Borland shipping a toolkit with horrible built-in skins well before Windows XP.

I even vaguely recall MS jumping on this bandwagon with some MFC styles.

[barrkel]

There was a fad for putting icons on dialog buttons. That was the most obvious Borland stylistic trait. Big green check mark on "OK" etc.

That, and Delphi applications not having a minimize to tray animation due to the application window technically being invisible.

[lproven]

Hang on hang on...

> There was a fad for putting icons on dialog buttons. That was the most obvious Borland stylistic trait. Big green check mark on "OK" etc.

This I remember well. It was a hallmark.

> That, and Delphi applications not having a minimize to tray animation due to the application window technically being invisible.

Say what now?!

[felipefar]

It's curious that in Qt Widgets QWidgets (that are generally "alien windows") aren't cheap either. If you implement a list view from scratch, you shouldn't create the list items as QWidgets otherwise your application will become slow very quickly.

What you want to do instead is to use custom drawing and event handling code for those list items. The it will be very snappy.

[arsome]

You can take advantage of QListView to handle high item count lists and it'll just request the data it needs when it needs it, scales to millions of rows without issue, you really don't want to draw it yourself.

[omnibrain]

The Start button is (or at least used to be) a Window. And in the first Release of they forgot to remove the window control menu - the thing that opens/used to open when you click the program icon on the top left corner. Obviously there was no program icon to click, but you could use a shortcut to open it. Then you could select "move" and move the start button on the task bar or even close it. After you closed it, it was gone and you had to kill explorer.exe via task manager and restart it, to get it back. I can't remember the shortcut, it must have been something like alt+-.

In older programs this menu is still around and you can still use it to close programs, like you did in Windows 3.1 days. Even doubleclicking the icon in the top left corner still works to close those programs.

[toast0]

> I can't remember the shortcut, it must have been something like alt+-.

It's alt+SPACE. Very handy if you manage to get a window off screen, you that menu almost always shows up on screen, and you can select Move (possibly by hitting m), and then move (or drag) your mouse and the window comes back.

[omnibrain]

> It's alt+SPACE.

Maybe, but I just tried it and it seems to open some type of search.

> Very handy if you manage to get a window off screen, you that menu almost always shows up on screen, and you can select Move (possibly by hitting m), and then move (or drag) your mouse and the window comes back.

I used to use it exactly for this, but it seems like they fixed something in the past 10 years, because that does no longer happen for me. I think the last time it happened was in the Windows 7 days. That's probably also why I forgot the shortcut.

I still use the double click in the top left corner to close windows, but they kill that for more and more programs. For some time it still worked for some programs with reduced chrome, like tabbed browsers, when I clicked on a few of the blank pixels in the top left corner.

[Stratoscope]

> > It's alt+SPACE.

> Maybe, but I just tried it and it seems to open some type of search.

That's because you installed PowerToys, and the PowerToys Run module takes over the Alt+Space key combo.

This really pissed me off the first time I wanted to use Alt+Space to rescue an offscreen window and I had no idea what this search box was.

It's a real problem with the kids who maintain Windows today and the "modern" Windows apps. They just don't know, and don't care, what the classical keyboard shortcuts are and how important they can be.

Here is one example of a GitHub issue that was closed as "wontfix":

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/13860

You can fix this by changing the "activation shortcut" for Run in the PowerToys Settings, or by disabling PowerToys Run entirely.

I changed it to Win+Alt+Space and now Alt+Space works like it always has.

Also, 'toast0' left out an important step in their description. You need to press Alt+Space, then M, and then any cursor key, and finally you can use the mouse to move the window.

[WorldMaker]

> It's a real problem with the kids who maintain Windows today and the "modern" Windows apps. They just don't know, and don't care, what the classical keyboard shortcuts are and how important they can be.

These days (since Windows Vista, hah) the easiest way to rescue an offscreen window is Win+Arrow (the "Aero Snap" keys). (It's also the easiest way to do most of the other old control menu things: Win+Up is Maximize/Restore and Win+Down is Minimize/Restore. The two lacking things are Move when you actually intend to keyboard move and Size for keyboard resizing, though both are less usual at modern resolutions than they used to be.)

If someone has installed PowerToys the likelihood they are using FancyZones increases and so too the likelihood they already use Win+Arrow shortcuts heavily (especially if they let FancyZones take over them for zones).

> Also, 'toast0' left out an important step in their description. You need to press Alt+Space, then M, and then any cursor key, and finally you can use the mouse to move the window.

You need to push a cursor key because Move was originally intended as an accessibility feature when you couldn't Move a window with the mouse (or needed more precision than your mouse supported) and needed to use the keyboard arrows. Also why Size exists in that old menu. If you want to talk about knowing the history of classical keyboard shortcuts, the use of that menu for keyboard accessibility to things instead of the mouse is an important part of why that menu existed in the first place (and part of why it feels so vestigial today because mice have improved so much since the early days of Windows and screen resolutions have grown so much since the early days of Windows that trying to precisely to-the-pixel move or resize windows with the keyboard today seems silly).

[toast0]

> You need to push a cursor key because Move was originally intended as an accessibility feature when you couldn't Move a window with the mouse (or needed more precision than your mouse supported) and needed to use the keyboard arrows.

I would say less accessibility, and more the mouse was optional with Windows before 95, so all features needed to be keyboard friendly. I think they became 'required' by spec in 95, but you could still do everything with a keyboard. Mousekeys was included in Win95 and is more of an accessibility feature.

[ogurechny]

> trying to precisely to-the-pixel move or resize windows with the keyboard today seems silly

I've recently discovered that GNOME switches between fast and precise keyboard dragging with Ctrl, and snaps to window edges on Shift. See process_keyboard_move_grab():

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/blob/main/src/compos...

[silon42]

Try Shift+Esc, maybe that works.

[ale42]

I don't think Shift+Esc does anything on Windows. In Firefox it opens a "Process manager" but that's just inside the browser, nothing related to Windows.

[Dwedit]

The start button is still a window, but it's not a top-level window. It's a child window of the taskbar. And has been so since Windows 95.

[ankurdhama]

Not anymore. On Windows 11 you can use spy++ to check the taskbar window and it will show up a single window and everything inside it, start button or program buttons, all are not a window. This seems to be the case for any app that is using <whatever is the new windows app framework>.

[ale42]

As far as I remember, Alt+- opens the menu of an MDI child window. For the current window (which is generally more useful, MDI applications being very rare these days), it's Alt+Space as mentioned by several people.

[ankurdhama]

I still use the window menu shortcut Alt+space and then C to close the window, it is more easy to press compare to Alt+f4 (such a non-ergonomic key combination, compare to macOS cmd+w)

[WorldMaker]

Ctrl+Q works in most (though yes, certainly not consistently all) Windows applications. Cmd+Q is also what you'd use on macOS to quit an entire application (Cmd+W is close single window), so the cross-platform ergonomics/muscle memory are actually somewhat preserved. Most Windows applications that still use MDI for some reason or that have tabbed browsing interfaces (appropriately) generally use Ctrl+W for window or tab closing, respectively.

[barrkel]

Anything in Windows that could get keyboard focus basically had to be a window. If you could tab to it, window.

[codedokode]

Windows (unlike X) had built-in windows classes (for example: buttons, checkboxes, input fields) that you could use to turn a window into a standard control. That's why idea "everything is a window" worked well in Windows.

[AceJohnny2]

I remember when Qt introduced the "alien windows" concept, in 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20080205085059/http://labs.troll...

As they say, they had to do it to eliminate flicker.

Which goes to show that if your elegant design can't scale, it will be corrupted until it can. Something something "worse is better"

[kragen]

i assume by 'windows' you mean 'microsoft windows', because otherwise your comment makes no sense

smalltalk has worked this way since at least 01976, but the word they used instead of 'window' was 'view'. see for example steve burbeck's 01992 'how to use model-view-controller' which is describing smalltalk-80 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238719652_Applicati...

> Views are designed to be nested. Most windows in fact involve at least two views, one nested inside the other. The outermost view, known as the topView is an instance of StandardSystemView or one of its subClasses. The StandardSystemView manages the familiar label tab of its window. Its associated controller, which is an instance of StandardSystemController, manages the familiar moving, framing, collapsing, and closing operations available for top level windows. Inside a topView are one or more subViews and their associated controllers which manage the control options available in those views. The familiar workspace for example has a StandardSystemView as a topView, and a StringHolderView as its single subView. A subView may, in turn, have additional subViews although this is not required in most applications.

so it's not a peculiarity of x-windows; it's how windows/icon/menu/pointer guis have been built since the beginning. (i'd say 'it's how guis have been built since the beginning' but of course sketchpad, grail, nls/augment, and genesys didn't work this way, and they were certainly graphical user interfaces, even if very different in style.)

[samatman]

> i assume by 'windows' you mean 'microsoft windows'

Yes of course he did, and you don't have to guess, because the phrase "Windows for example uses" makes Windows a singular noun, compare with "windows for example use". There is no possible ambiguity in the post you replied to.

[bongodongobob]

Wait are you talking about Microsoft Windows? Your post makes no sense, I can't make heads or tails of it :(

[kragen]

sam, knock it off

find a hobby other than harassing me on hn

if you can't control yourself, take a break from hn

(most recent previous incident, though not the only one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39402249)

[wruza]

GTK also uses windows for input-related widgets. It’s simply convenient to have a separate window context. Although these windows are GDK windows, which may or may not have system windows underneath, afair.

[asveikau]

> Windows doesn't have the same client/server overhead as X though.

Yes it does. You think they run that in the same address space? When there are multiple processes with different privilege levels running their UIs? Maybe this comment was accurate for Win3.1, but for a long time there is absolutely a client server architecture behind it.

Anyway one of my favorite uses of HWND is to use a non visible window as a worker thread mechanism. Each HWND is tied to a message pump in the thread that owns it. So you can send it messages, and boom, you have a thread API...

[p_l]

On all "Classic" Windows and on NT from NT4 until DWM in Vista, GDI was not client-server instead it would draw directly to VRAM With some kernel assistance on NT (before NT4, GDI calls were handled by separate server process).

This is why misbehaving application could get you the famous "trailing window" effect where moving a window would leave partly painted trace of it behind - you had to wait for some other coffee to properly repaint that other area.

With DWM, your GDI windows are backed by memory that at most will be a texture in DirectX, which will be then composited by DWM (equivalent of X11 extensions to capture window drawing into pixmap instead of lowest common denominator implementation of DIX/DDX that would draw immediately to framebuffer)

[rob74]

Yup... I was working on a password manager application for Windows a few years ago, which was easy for most applications using the native UI because of all controls having window handles - and was then disappointed that it didn't work in cross platform apps such as Firefox.

[pjmlp]

Yeah it was already the way of doing GUIs in 16 bit days.

[fsckboy]

>Windows doesn't have the same client/server o̶v̶e̶r̶h̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶X̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶

...features and functionality as X, regretably