As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount.
I made Facebook and FB Messenger for Windows. It was considered a complete failure by management as it never got above 1% of the usage by windows users vs the website.
The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms. If you can sustain a more deliberate, low churn pace of development then it's workable. Features can be well defined and then implemented by the platform team as they see fit. But if you want a more fast-paced, "just in time" style of development, you need to coordinate with every team for every change... wouldn't it be nice to just write web code and be done? Even Microsoft are building this way these days. This is why ironically small companies seem more able to support native apps than large ones. The more "stuff" that's being worked on concurrently, the harder it is to support multiple platforms.
The developer makes a highly optimized native app that is a hit with the user. Now that it's a hit, the developer is now big company. And big company needs telemetry, A/B experiments, fast iteration. They can't just sit around waiting for the original developer to spend more years crafting another masterpiece. Due to tech, sign-ins, or what have you the app is also a kind of monopoly. Since it's a monopoly, quality doesn't matter. It can be a bloated electron thing and nobody can do anything about it other than suck it.
V8 reserves memory in chunks of 256MB using virtualalloc with MEM_RESERVE on Windows (I think). It has to do that for each isolated process where an isolate is a tab, webview, worker, etc. A page that's built up from 4 isolated processes will reserve 1GB of RAM. That's only virtual alloc though, so other OS processes can take the memory if they really need it. There is essentially no way to tell if a JS app is using a lot of memory just by looking at what the process has reserved. There's loads of things that end up in that space - cached pages, cached compiled code, cached bitmaps of rendered pages, etc. The task monitor tells you what Chrome or Chromium (e.g. Electron) is doing, not what the web app is doing.
You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. So then the question becomes, is this coordination cost worth it and how much are we willing to "spend". It seems the cost is worth it for Android and iOS since the native app experience on those platforms is so much better. The macOS app is just a tweaked iOS app so it's also easy to justify. But what about Windows? The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them. Just look at the 2 context menus on Windows Explorer, they can't even get the sizes and colors between them right.
To clarify, I am just quoting the comments from people who are much smarter than me, this isn't specifically my take (though I do broady agree with it which is why I am signal-boosting it) Sorry, I am using blockquotes but they probably don't render everywhere.
@matt I guess the real question is... does WhatsApp really need to move fast, or can it focus on doing chat very well and deliberate over features to consider them worth implementing? I use WhatsApp. I live in Europe, it's very hard to not use it around here. But realistically the times I have used it and thought man, this needs some speedy rapid quick fast reckless silicon valley style innovation are... basically 0. I understand that it's probably about not making much money or whatever I don't know. But it worked. It worked well. I somehow never found myself in a situation where messaging, the thing it's supposed to do, didn't work in a way I wanted. You type a message into a single or group chat, you press send, and it sends. You paste a file in a single or group chat, and it sends. It just... didn't need much to happen to it that wasn't already happening. I don't mind web apps so I'll probably get used to this one too, even if it does somehow just feel slower overall to use. Or maybe I'll just stop using it on PC and go back to using it on the phone where it's still good. But very few of those arguments make any sense to me at all.
@matt I guess it wasn't really targetted at me though. I never use statuses. I don't use many communities; although the ones I do actually use seem to work OK enough. I mostly use Discord for that kind of thing. OK... maybe I see the problem after all. But like... at least in my mind, they're completely separate apps trying to do different things. I rarely if ever use Discord for DM's. It' sjust not convenient for that the way WhatsApp is. So I guess my main worry is that WhatsApp will stop being good at that thing, and then... yeah I honestly don't know.
@fireborn @talon @matt I very much understand where you're coming from with this, as someone who never uses statuses and channels. However we have hundreds of millions of people who do use statuses and channels, and a whole lot of other things. If I was them, I would expect our desktop app to at least keep pace with what's already available on other platforms.
@talon @matt I agree, if the features are there, then all platforms should keep up with them. I just don't think the features need to be there in the first place.
counterpoint: those thousands of people wouldn't use the feature if the feature just hadn't been implemented in the first place. Not every app needs to serve every demographic.
I mean, if it was my app, I would never have thought something like Statuses needed to be there, but they are. I also wouldn't think we need a biz app. Or AI. And now I don't even have an app because I didn't think of how to make it sustainable and I had to shut it all down due to the hosting cost. I shouldn't be trusted to make an app that scales to three billion, is what I am saying.
@talon @matt I think what the post is getting at is that the nature of large companies necessitates making financially motivated decisions over what may be preferable from a technical standpoint. In this case, someone saw that the app was "stagnating," IE not keeping up with the pace of feature development on other platforms. This was seen as a problem, with a solution. It's not the only one, but when you are a mobile app with one team that knows c# and another team that knows JS, you're gonna make your C# devs migrate to JS, not the other way around. JS is easier to hire for, easier to build for and works crossplatform.
A smaller company could say, "we want a simple native app experience so just go to the phone for the other stuff," and deal with the churn, but that's not an option when growth is prioritized by upper management and you have already grown huge.
@talon @matt Personally, I'm not that phased by the switch to a web app in and of itself. However, it raises the question: are they going to invest in improving the accessibility of said web app? I have a Greasemonkey script to compensate for a bunch of accessibility inefficiency in the web app, so I'm personally fine, but I shouldn't need that and nor should anyone else. As usual, they've jumped on the web app train without actually investing in making said web app elegantly accessible.
@jcsteh Accessibility remains a priority for us along with the other platforms we support. The one positive of all this is more investment in the web version. There's a lot of juggling going on but they are not unaware. I make sure. @talon @matt
@talon @matt Glad to hear that. I'm not quite clear on whether you work directly for Meta, etc., so I didn't want to make assumptions about how much influence you have. But also, we all know that accessibility teams often have far less control over things than they really should...
I think few people are using the Win32 APIs directly and Microsoft has been shifting their stuff a bunch. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation ) had been the recommendation a while back, but then Microsoft started pushing UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Both of those have been succeeded by WinUI 3. UWP has been deprecated. WPF is alive, but more in a maintenance mode while WinUI 3 takes over the future. Oh, and WinForms were popular, but now not. There's definitely been a lot of shifting and I think that's caused a lot of annoyance in the developer community - especially as Microsoft ships JS/WebView2 based apps instead of dogfooding their own stuff. If you hang out in the dotnet subreddit enough, you'll definitely see Windows devs annoyed at Microsoft's mercurial attitude toward their desktop frameworks and seeming lack of direction/interest - as their big new things are JS/WebView2.
I still use Windowsforms because first, it's the most accessible in terms of developed apps (native controls under the hood, hence the best screen reader support), and second, it has convenient auto-layout things like TableLayoutPanel.
Microsoft: "We offer GREAT backwards compatibility! The best in the business!" Also Microsoft: "Man, doing things the old way is so hard. What if we had a clean break with the past?!?!" Microsoft, some time later: "Man, making a clean break from the past is so hard. Let's just ship what we've done so far and think about finishing up the rest later. What? Windows Explorer is broken, and you refuse to let us ship!? Fine, we'll hack something in and not tell anyone."
@WeirdWriter @talon @matt This only works so long as there's an accessible alternative to whatever you want to use that is actually good. Yes, alternatives to everything usually exist, but the problem is they usually don't have the same level of polish. Sure for people into technology they can work, but try getting someone who just doesn't care and just wants to send messages to use maytrix or delta chat or whatever. not going to happen.
Koumbit now offers a turnkey shared Nextcloud hosting service starting at 50GB.
NextCloud is a suite of online collaboration tools. It offers file storage and sharing (similar to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive).
You are tired to rely on the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) who steal your personal information and then sell them to the american orange monster? Here is your opportunity to escape! For more details, see: koumbit.org/en/content/shared-…
The Shared Nextcloud Hosting service is for clients who wants a space to hold and edit their files collectively. It includes updates twice a year to ensure the safety and performance of the service.
I run my servers at home, via a WireGuard tunnel to a VPS. My VPS provider handles DDoS protection. I don't use any NAT, the real static IPs are on my servers at home. It's simple and works good enough.
The important part here is that by not hosting directly from my residential ISP's IP address I don't have to actually absorb an attack if one happens. It can be cut off "upstream" at the VPS provider, or I can just... turn the tunnel off.
If your school or workplace uses Exchange for email, accessing it with Thunderbird just got easier! Our blog post has all the details on getting connected. Additional features, like calendar and address book, are in the works!
Any idea when Calendar and OAuth support for Exchange accounts will be released? Been waiting for full Exchange support in Thunderbird for quite a while.
I will be able to dispense of the TBSync add-on once that happens.
Will we be able to access shared inboxes? I have to departmental inboxes that I need access to. Currently I can access them with the Owl add-on extension.
I was setting up TB with Exchange up 20 years ago, if I couldn't migrate them to a saner mail server. Nice it's now built in. The big problem with Thunderbird is that Mozilla has progressively wrecked the UI; now it completely ignores the OS style/theme. Plugins killed off Account Interface much worse than it used to be. More awkward to migrate content to a new install, with the annoying 1st time Wizard.
It's much harder to use a Gmail account, but that's Google's fault.
@raymaccarthy Hey there, and we're sorry for any frustration with recent changes. We're working on integrating the desktop apps into native OS notifications, though we do only have one app for all 3 operating systems as we're a small team! We have a team member who is also an Add-on developer helping others update their add-ons, and we want to find other ways to support our add-on community. And we're definitely improving the Account Wizard for a better experience.
I don't care about "integrating the desktop apps into native OS notifications" There is a way since for ages to have notifications on Linux Mint + Mate. The last sane TB was way before 91.9.1 which is one of the last to able to use OS Theme. Accounts GUI dumbed down for years. Account setup blocked by pointless wizard for years. Using TB since about 2004. Email on Windows since 1994. Lots of add-ons disabled years ago by pointless changes. Option to disable Account Wizard at start!
It's not recent changes. It's been worse on every release for years. Even Thunderbird 11.0.1 on XP was better than 91.x which is better than current. I have a few Linux Mint + Mate with current Thunderbird. Updates blacklisted on other machines. Oldest Windows archive is 1.5.0.7 and Linux is 1.0 (probably on Red Hat or Suse or Debian).
I did Windows & Linux programming in C, Pascal, Modula-2, C++, Perl, Java & C# for years.
@LaggyKar EWS will continue to be supported for Exchange on-premise mailboxes for the forseeable future. (techcommunity.microsoft.com/bl…) But thanks for the feedback on the wording!
Update 3/27/2025: We updated the "Access to public folders" section below.
This post is a part of our EWS (Exchange Web Services) to Microsoft Graph Migration Guide Series.
on the one side, it's pleasant that my favorite mail client finally handles that b***y exchange...
on the other hand, I have been using and paying for the excellent OWL plugin for years and have been very happy with it... this TB update does mean the end of this project (services.addons.thunderbird.ne…)
@dgoosens OWL will definitely be needed in the interim for address books and calendar support, and the developer of OWL hasn't made any announcements about discontinuing the add-on.
@btaroli We know everyone will be anxiously awaiting Calendar and Address book, and even if they might not be coming as soon as you hope, we'll keep everyone posted here on our progress!
It's already available in the current nightly flatpak version. It is so nice to be able to use the new event quick-add popover, with no extra swirly pages etc. to pick the target calendar. Very efficient! 😌
Thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton for their patience and sisyphean rebasing of that much awaited merge request over the past 2 years 🫡
Okay, that's it, I'm turning off all notifications and badges for the Google Play Store. It's nothing but spam now, with what appears to be no way to only get functional notifications.
Edit: I provisionally take it back, there is a config section after you expand, titled " payments, deals, and recommendations". I'll report back in a few days whether this works or not.
Despite “my” contract ending with the end of the year, but the company being a side in that contract decided to kick out some people, including me, earlier. So their Christmas present for me is the lack of a job.
So I'm looking for opportunities for a jack of all trades #Linux sysadmin, with broad, 10y+ experience in system and applications administration. Preferred location would be #Strasbourg.
In Mac OS X Tahoe (and probably Sequoia), the OS downloads between 14G and 40G of these stupid aerial flyover videos. I never asked for this bullshit. I deleted the files and they came back.
🕓Z #NowPlaying #Live at top of hour join Chrissie Cochrane, Chris Gray, Kelly Sapergia. and the gang for a friendly #chat on All Sorts! Imagine you're in a comfortable room chatting with friends about this and that; playing a bit of music, and keeping the children amuzed as well. That's what it's all about. Live Chat with Us theglobalvoice.info/chatroom find the link to Zoom with us here: theglobalvoice.info/gallery.ph… and Listen at theglobalvoice.info:8443/broad… #TGVRadio 👥📺🗣️🗣💬💁
The Global Voice's Chat Room Welcome to The Global Voice's text-based chat room, where you can communicate with DJs and other listeners live! Rules We ask that you please keep the following rules in mind: Keep the discussion family friendly.
I am sure you Jazz enthusiasts will appreciate this. This is Super Mario, but if it were all done in that classic Ghusion Japanese 80's style. youtube.com/watch?v=pqsDHPAgRm…
Continuing our reimagining series, this mix revisits the soundtrack of Super Mario 64 (1996), composed by Koji Kondo, whose writing shaped the identity of 3D...
VST companies are gonna hate this... I made a FREE Bitwig preset that lets you "steal" the settings from any compressor VST just by looking at it. In Bitwig :D
In today's video, I'm sharing a special Bitwig Studio preset I built called the 'Compressor Analyzer.' It's a unique tool, made entirely with stock Bitwig de...
There's still a bunch that still needs to be documented, and potentially adapted, to be approachable without prior knowledge (the documentation side of things at least is on my todo). Roughly, we've built a few reusable Rust components that help support HTTP-based mail protocols, and we're currently looking at generalising the interface between TB's historical backend and the newer Rust stuff to also be reusable by other protocols (current context is supporting MS Graph).
There's also a LOT of architectural knowledge we've gained throughout this work. The last time a mail protocol was added to TB was over 20y ago, and although the backend to support them has been maintained since then, understanding it enough to add new protocols is a different task entirely. That's also another area where we'll need more documentation (also somewhere on my todo unless someone gets there first).
this is just normal internet business. When I worked at a smaller ISP/datacenter we had contracts with customers promising uptime and if we failed even because our own upstream providers had outages, we had to refund/credit based on the contracts.
Now the place I work for has huge contracts with Amazon and CloudFlare. I am not sure about the CloudFlare situation, but Amazon has refunded us hundreds of thousands of dollars for outages.
A new travel description podcast from JJ Hunt, I’ve just launched a new travel description podcast called Describe Away. I captured description-rich audio of whale watching in Newfoundland, cabin time in Nova Scotia, and sunsets on Vancouver Island, using feedback and tips gleaned from the described walking tours and live events I’ve done within the Blind community. Search for Describe Away on your favourite podcast player, or click this link and go to describeaway.buzzsprout.com/
Looking forward to it, especially as I'm going to experiment with some interactive methods of teaching screenreader use that might be useful in future trainings I'll be giving... front-end.social/@dnikub/11556…
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Alert: #web #accessibility talk and workshop coming up!
Join me at d*sign week, the festival for experimental and independent design practices happening from the 24th to the 30th of November in Linz, Austria 🤓
🎙️ I'll be giving …
anecdote (in agreement) about keeping out fascists
Sensitive content
A couple of years ago, I was brought in as a moderator to help de-fascist a community that had practically turned into 4chan, in one of the most fundamentally-abuse-attracting and difficult-to-moderate categories of community (privacy/security-related).
The policy was set as "no fascists, no alt-right, nothing that looks like it" and people would either get banned immediately (if clearly intentionally abusive) or get a warning otherwise that they were expected to take seriously (doubling down would be grounds for a ban). Every ban was permanent but revocable if someone showed genuine reflection and commitment to do better - this sometimes took minutes, sometimes months or even longer, sometimes never.
Randos complained for months. "You just call everyone a nazi", "how do you define fascist then", "you're being unreasonable", "the alt right aren't fascists", and so on, and so forth. Without exception, the ones complaining about it the most were the ones who already had a track prior record of being an asshole in different ways. A lot of the bans were the result of brigading attempts from, well, fascists who objected to being pushed out, pretending to be 'new users' and mysteriously immediately knowing about previous bans that happened before they joined.
It took a while, but they eventually gave up. The result was a pleasant community to be in, unusually pleasant for a privacy/security community. I haven't been around there for quite a while now, but my understanding is that it's still a nice place to this day.
"No fascists allowed" works, even under the worst conditions, and the "no, seriously, this is not up for debate, the moderator decides" is a critical component of making it work.
Gestern ein bisschen spontan den Umzug von Gmail zu @Tutanota vollzogen. Abgesehen von den Herzschlagmomenten beim Umzug der Domain samt DNS-Einstellungen, war das initial ganz erfolgreich. Nicht ganz so geschmeidig ist der Workflow - Tuta reagiert an allen Ecken und Enden behäbiger, der Spam-Filter sortiert gerne echte Mails aus, aber belässt massig Spam im Posteingang. Und auch die Farbgebung ist nicht ganz meine…
Aber vielleicht gewöhnt man sich aneinander und alles wird gut 🌈☀️
I had a cheeky comment prepared for today, saying that you shouldn't rely on Cloudflare if you can afford it, and that you don't truly self-host when you use it, but I could not post it because one of the services I don't self-host —my Mastodon instance— depends on #Cloudflare, too. 😅
Not every open source software project can or should live on forever: priorities change, technologies evolve, and interests shift over time. From a corporate perspective, you don’t want to have neglected or abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities owned by your organization. However, responsibly sunsetting an open source project is more than just clicking the archive button on your repository. The CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project can help you with this process. fastwonderblog.com/2025/11/18/…
Doug Belshaw
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