We just rely on layers and layers of cruft. We then demand improvements when things get too bad, but we're only operating on the very top layer where even dramatic improvements and magic are irrelevant.
Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt.
A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this.
Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!
> A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app
I think this blame is fair. Electron is the most obvious example, but in general desktop software that essentially embeds a full browser instance because it makes development slightly easier is the culprit in almost every case I've experienced.
I use a Windows 10 laptop for work.[1] The app that has the most lag and worst performance impact for as long as I've used the laptop is Microsoft Teams. Historically, chat/conferencing apps would be pretty lightweight, but Teams is an Electron app, so it spawns eight processes, over 200 threads, and consumes about 1GB of memory while idle.
Slack is a similar situation. Six processes, over 100 threads, ~750MB RAM while idle. For a chat app!
Microsoft recently added embedded Edge browser controls into the entire Office 365 suite (basically embraced-and-extended Electron), and sure enough, Office is now super laggy too. For example, accepting changes in a Word doc with change tracking enabled now takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds per change, where it was almost instantaneous before. Eight msedgewebview2.exe processes, ~150 threads, but at least it's only consuming about 250MB of RAM.
Meanwhile, I can run native code, .NET, Java, etc. with reasonable performance as long as the Electron apps aren't also running. I can run multiple Linux VMs simultaneously on this laptop with good response times, or I can run 1-2 Electron apps. It's pretty silly.
[1] Core i5, 16GB RAM, SSD storage. Not top of the line, but typical issue for a business environment.
Create a cross-platform UI toolkit that is easy to use, has all the accessibility features of the browser built in, and has a UI control toolkit as rich as say mui.com ... Support SVG as well as stylized layout similar to html+css.
It's not an easy task, and it's not something that anyone has really done. There are plenty of single platform examples, and Flutter is about as close as you can get in terms of cross platform.
There are also alternatives that can use the engine of an installed OS browser. Tauri is a decent example for Rust. Also, Electron isn't to blame for the issues with Teams. VS Code pretty much proves you can create a relatively responsive application in a browser interface.
It's been done many times. HTML/DOM is a very primitive UI toolkit by any measure, even with extensions like mui.com beating it is not all that difficult. Are a few open source hackers going to manage - no. Can other companies manage it, yes. Especially accessibility really isn't as hard as people sometimes make out on this forum, and HTML isn't that good at it (because it lacks a lot of semantic information by default).
Consider the feature set of JavaFX when used in combination with the AtlantaFX theme/widget pack. It isn't well known, but is maintained and has an active open source community today.
- All the same controls as mui.com shows and more advanced ones too, like a rich text editor, a way more advanced table view, tree views, table tree views, etc.
- Media and video support.
- 3D scene graph support. HTML doesn't have this! If you want to toss some 3D meshes into your UI you have to dive into OpenGL programming.
- When using FXML, semantic markup ( etc)
- Straightforward layout management.
- A dialect of CSS2.something for styling, a TextFlow widget for styling and flowing rich text.
- Fully reactive properties and collections, Svelte style (or moreso).
- Icon fonts and SVG works.
- Sophisticated animations and timelines API.
And so on. It's also cross platform on desktop and mobile, and can run in a web browser (see https://jpro.one where the entire website is a javafx app), and can be accessed from many different languages.
Flutter is actually not quite as featureful in comparison, for example there's no WebView control or multi-window support on desktop, though Flutter has other advantages like the hot reload feature, better supported mobile story. The community is lovely too.
Then you have AppKit, which is also very feature rich.
So it's definitely a task that people have done. Many of these toolkits have features HTML doesn't even try to have. The main thing they lack is that, well, they aren't the web. People often find out about apps using hypertext and being able to have a single space for documents and apps is convenient. When you're not heavily reliant on low friction discovery though, or have alternatives like the app stores, then web-beating UI toolkits aren't that big of a lift in comparison.
> Electron isn't to blame for the issues with Teams. VS Code pretty much proves you can create a relatively responsive application in a browser interface
Electron is great, but most apps aren't VS Code. On my 2019 Intel MacBook Terminal.app starts in <1 second and WhatsApp starts in about 7 seconds. Electron is Chrome and Chrome's architecture is very specifically designed for being a web browser. The multi-process aspect of Chrome is for example not a huge help for Electron where the whole app is trusted anyway, though because HTML is so easy to write insecurely, sandboxing that part of it can still be helpful even with apps that don't display untrusted data. That yields a lot of overhead especially on Windows where processes are expensive.
Just to make sure I'm not being one of those people: What AccessKit [1] has now, across Windows, macOS, and Linux, took roughly six person-months of work. We still need to support more widget types, especially list views, tables (closely related), and tree views, but we do already have text editing covered on Windows and macOS. Perhaps it helps that I'm an accessibility expert, especially on Windows. Anecdotally, it seems that implementing UIA from scratch is daunting for non-experts. But I guess in the big picture it's really not that hard.