[chairhairair]

This will never happen because:

1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles.

2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels.

Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.).

NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.

[ryandrake]

The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.

[lmz]

No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.

[bigstrat2003]

But people would claim that it's easier for a company to take a bunch of web frontend devs and have them develop a UI which rides on top the already-existing Electron. Which is why we have such a plague of bloated Electron apps - because companies are lazy and don't care about the end user experience.

[lmz]

Well, yes. Just saying that once you make draw calls and raw input events available they will be used against you.

[SR2Z]

But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!

[dharmab]

Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.

[LoganDark]

File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.

[Y_Y]

I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.

[dharmab]

It's one of those things where you try it and feel how snappy it is. Like when people switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome.