From a product perspective, re-inventing the wheel for something that — at best, many years from now — will be at parity with native presentation layers in terms of performance, a11y support, user experience, etc. is normally considered a risky move. Many startups have failed in part from pouring resources into shiny non-differentiators.
The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this. I understand the appeal of creating frameworks like GPUI, but the article doesn't explain the relationship to the problem Zed is trying to solve.
There's also Zoom, which apparently uses an internal, heavily-modified fork of some Chinese UI framework on Windows (and QT on everything else). They did go the extra mile and add accessibility support though, their American clients, particularly the ones in government, healthcare and education, didn't really give them any other option.
There's also Google Docs, which uses weird tricks instead of rendering straight to DOM. They didn't even bother implementing accessibility in that layer, something which would probably have been impossible back then. Instead, they offer an accessibility mode and mark their entire UI as hidden to assistive technologies. When the accessibility mode is on, all speech is generated by a micro screen reader implemented in Google Docs directly, and the generated messages are sent as text to be spoken by your real screen reader. This is an ugly hack that doesn't really support braille displays very well, so they later implemented yet another layer of ugly hacks that retrofits the document on top of an actual DOM.
Your point still stands though, these are exceptions that prove the rule.
Interesting, thanks! It looks like Figma (a clear success) also took the "just give me a canvas" route:
"Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser. […] Instead of attempting to get one of these to work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested layer opacity, and more. All rendering is done on the GPU and is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a browser inside a browser; we have our own DOM, our own compositor, our own text layout engine, and we’re thinking about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to render HTML."https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
The value proposition of a "boil the ocean" approach to UX frameworks is clearer for browser-based apps than native apps. That said, 7 years in, Figma apparently has a long way to go:
"To repeat a familiar refrain: We still have a lot of work to do! As we continue to improve access to our own products, we’re also advancing our understanding of what our users need to design accessibly."https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-figjam-screen-reader-s...
> The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this
Successful non-native UIs? Microsoft Office. Every single Adobe product, including the ones they got from Macromedia. I feel most professional software fall in this category. Spotify originally launched with completely custom UI. On Windows it is more difficult to name successful products that used native UI than those that did not.
I always assumed it was since the accessibility is there, but these are all Microsoft APIs after all, so they might just have implemented them on their own.
From a product perspective, re-inventing the wheel for something that — at best, many years from now — will be at parity with native presentation layers in terms of performance, a11y support, user experience, etc. is normally considered a risky move. Many startups have failed in part from pouring resources into shiny non-differentiators.
The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this. I understand the appeal of creating frameworks like GPUI, but the article doesn't explain the relationship to the problem Zed is trying to solve.