The Hot Take: Well that's good, now that seeing Microsoft is going back to discreet applications and not just skins of Microsoft Edge to consume all your RAM. You'd think MS apps would be optimized for each other but I guess the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
âMicrosoft has resolved a known issue that rendered the classic Outlook email client unusable for users who enabled the Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in. [...]
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The Hot Take: So does this mean Microsoft Edge won't be consuming ALL of my RAM? I mean this is probably in response to the RAM usage I would think.
Microsoft has confirmed it will build 100% native apps for Windows 11 and form a new team to spearhead the project. Itâs unclear whether all new apps will be built on a native UI framework like WinUI, but Microsoft has assured that at least some wonât rely on web-based components.
Back in 2020, Microsoftâs Windows boss, Panos Panay, said the company wants you to love Windows, not just need it. However, nothing really happened, and Panos eventually left the company.
Fast forward to 2026, Windows leadership is promising another revival, but this time, Microsoft appears serious, and weâre seeing internal efforts.
Microsoft has announced a major Windows 11 update to address underlying performance issues, make the context menu load faster, reduce File Explorer launch time, move the Start menu to WinUI, and add the ability to move the taskbar. In fact, youâll be able to resize the taskbar and switch to a compact layout, similar to the Windows 10 experience.
But it turns out Windows improvements wonât be limited to OS-level components, as Microsoft has also pledged to improve apps.
Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, says he is forming a team focused on building better apps for Windows 11.
âIâm building a new team to work on Windows apps! You donât need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer,â Huyn wrote in a post on X. âIf youâve built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, Iâd love to hear from you.â
Many developers are already applying, but some are questioning Microsoftâs approach. One user asked whether these apps would be PWAs (Progressive Web Apps).
To our surprise, Huyn dismissed that idea and said the new Windows 11 apps will be 100% native.
That said, â100%â is a strong claim.
Some so-called native apps today are only partially built with WinUI, with certain features still relying on WebView. A truly native app would be fully built on the WinUI framework, without loading components through WebView.
At the moment, we donât know what the new ânativeâ Windows 11 apps are coming our way, and itâs also not clear if Microsoft plans to update existing web-based apps with a native UI.
Right now, Microsoft rarely builds native apps for Windows 11. In fact, Windows 11âs built-in video editor, Clipchamp, is also a Progressive Web App.
Microsoft Clipchamp is a WebView2 powered video editor
Moreover, Microsoftâs two flagship products, Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot, are now web apps.
Over the past few years, Microsoft has shown little to no interest in building native apps for Windows 11, and third-party developers have followed the companyâs lead.
WhatsApp is one of the popular apps that dropped the native WinUI framework in favor of a Chromium-based web app.
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can convince Meta and other companies to build native apps for Windows 11, or if it will make Microsoft Store rules stricter.
We also donât know if Microsoft plans to update existing web-based apps with a native UI.
The post Microsoft plans to build 100% native apps for Windows 11, as web apps ruin the OS experience appeared first on Windows Latest
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The Hot Take: Something they've been screaming about for a long time. What about options to disable all the Ai in the OS? /crickets
Movable and resizable Taskbar is confirmed to be making its way to Windows 11 this year. Here's everything you need to know about how it will work!
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The Hot Take: Yeah Microsoft and all companies could have done this long ago but now that RAM is priced through the roof is the only reason they're now looking at this. I wouldn't doubt all the browser folks are going to suddenly start looking at their usage here soon.
A former Windows leader recently discussed a project that promised a 20% reduction in Windows 11âs memory and storage usage.
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The Hot Take: Trying to prevent privacy or true bug? Hmmmmm
It's not your VPN app that needs to be blamed. It's Google.
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The Hot Take: Finally listening to the customers? Nah, this is to quiet them just enough to continue moving to their goals.
'Doze boss admits quality is down, promises smaller memory footprint and fixes for many well-known issues Microsoft has acknowledged that it needs to improve the quality of Windows 11 and outlined its plan to get the job done.âŚ
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The Hot Take: GrapheneOS looks better more and more every day! Maybe I pay off my phone to move over to it now rather than later.
Sideloading on Android will get much harder for certain apps.
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The Hot Take: Linux is coming for Windows Gamers for sure!
Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.
The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free.
All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.
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The Hot Take: This has me wanting to try this again on my pixel after i unlock it.
GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup.
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The Hot Take: Linux appears to be getting more Rust by the day.
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction. The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."
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