Meta just killed native WhatsApp on Windows 11, now it opens WebView, uses 1GB RAM all the time

Cut Meta some slack. They’re not Nvidia. They’re only a $1.5T company. They can’t make everything native.

hahah, 1.5T ! peons !

And they sell laptops with 4 GB RAM and pre-installed Windows 11 here. No idea how they work. :)

They don't!
A friend told me they had a laptop that just suddenly stopped working and took forever to boot up.
Turns out it was a W10 laptop and it prompted them to install Windows 11 which basically made it non functional. Took 10+ minutes to boot and could barely open a single browser window. I installed Linux and suprise surprise the laptop worked perfecly fine.
- I don’t understand windows business model for these low end laptops.
  They just make windows look bad (not that it’s good).
  So many people have “windows slow” imprinted on their brains because they buy a $500 or less computer and expect it to be as good as a 1500 MacBook…
- that’s not even a new thing…
  my mother had a windows 7 laptop for work, she upgraded it to windows 10 (microsoft did a similar nagging back then) and not only did it become atrociously slow, a bunch of hardware drivers also stopped working, including pretty important stuff like USB
  unfortunately linux wouldn’t have been an option cause the software she needed was (and still is) windows only
- No surprise there!
  Then they sell useless OOTB laptops. Those laptops desperately need Linux (or BSD).

Tip: you can use the WhatsApp web site for text messaging (I don't think it works for audio/video?) and if you want to use it in a standalone window you can "install" it as a web app (in most browsers). It'll use way less RAM running in your existing browser than running a separate electron instance.

(I don’t think it works for audio/video?)
it does
- Since when? Because last I used it Video and Audio calls required their native app (their excuse was their encryption couldn't run on the website)

It's called enshittification for sure.

It's beyond that. It's surveillance software
- That's part of enshittification I'd say. It's all about squeezing your users for as much money as you can, and surveillance is part of that.

The one fucking app of theirs that was done really well and they kill it.
Microsoft might as well deprecate their UI Toolkit now. The best 3rd party app to showcase it is dead and even their own apps are just web wrappers nowadays 🙄

This could mean great news to Linux WhatsApp users.

i use the web version and it works just as well, while also benefiting from not being a native program that can steal more data than just a tab in your browser
- Can it do video and audio calls?

Are there seriously anyone in here, that uses WhatsApp? If so, please revise your life...

Here in Brazil whatsapp is almost mandatory, if you dont have it you cant talk to anyone
- almost mandatory
  That's bullying talk. It's the same everywhere... and what matters is the "almost" part. If people need you, they find a way. It might be SMS, it might be email, you might be left out from groupchat but you can still be reached.
- Sounds really sad to be so dependent on it...
I have a bunch of friends from most corners of Europe, most highly educated, all of them use WhatsApp. I use Signal with those who are on there, but 90% are only on WhatsApp, so I am too.
Worse yet, my friends and family in my home country are almost all only on Facebook Messenger. I stopped using that entirely, and clumsily reach out on SMS whenever necessary. It has absolutely made it harder to stay in touch with people I care about.
I also avoid a lot of other social networks that would have been nice in order to keep in touch with my friends in other parts of the world, which is pretty much all of them as I travel. Pixelfed is nice, but my friends are still on Instagram. Or even Snapchat, even though I'm in my 30s.
Not all my friends are privacy nerds, and I wouldn't want them to be either. So I just gently push for Signal whenever I can while I hold my nose and continue to run WhatsApp.
Said like a truly ignorant person. There are countries where work teams discuss almost everything on WhatsApp. My mom is a teacher, and all communication regarding work that doesn't justify an entire official mail happens on whatsapp. Literally everyone's on whatsapp. Also, it's not really that hard to just use whatsapp on the web.
- Oh, you are truly ignorant - sorry to hear that.
  Literally everyone I know, is not on WhatsApp... And most of those I have known to use it, don't anymore... Why would you, really? You do know that change start with you, right? Or are you too ignorant to know that?
USA =/= rest of the world.
- You are right - USA is not the rest of the world... What's your point?
It's the de facto communication medium in Europe. It's not much of a choice. Even work related groups are usually over WhatsApp.
- It’s kinda scary that Europe is so willing to let all of their private messages go through an American data broker company that is well known for doing sneaky things to get data they aren’t supposed to have.
- Now, I live in Europe, and my family, friends and others, don't use WhatsApp... So it is much of a choice.
I hate WhatsApp. But there are several of my clients that use it and require me to.
- I have never had anyone "require" it of me... I've had a few ask me about it, and I said I don't use it... No more problem there, we find another way to communicate.

There are so many better alternatives than both meta and windows. It’s enshitification personified.

Thinking on going back to linux sooo bad. lol
- I recently had a driver issue that prevented my Linux from booting. It was still less frustrating to deal with than Windows in general.
  (The solution was literally one button press: In the menu to select what to boot, I pressed "down" in order to load the previous kernel version and work with that until a patch was available. Everything worked just fine.)

Lol trash

How much ram were the native app consuming?

If it is any more than 300mb it would be too much. But these days, big companies don’t care about RAM usage…
- Just download more RAM.
  And in all seriousness, poorly written programs hoarding all the RAM amidst a huge RAM shortage is selfish and vile.
190MB, according to the article. And when it was idling, it would be only tens of MB

So, like Steam, half of all ("native") E-Mail clients and almost all Markdown readers? I mean, there's a fucking Bash script around to correctly display Markdown in the shell.

What a time to compute.

Thankyou Microsoft

TBH that happens when there is enough RAM available. I'd be surprised if the usage didn't ~~get~~ go down under memory pressure.

Shame, would something like Ferdium fare better in that case?

I usually only used the webversion anyway?

First (feels like) everyone complained about apps (for example restaurants) and demanded a web page.
Then there's a fully functional web page and everyone looses their mind because nothing of value (seriously, what could the native app do better?) was lost.

Can't get upset if I never used WhatsApp.

It's weird that they pulled the plug on that version, considering the Mac version is still native and they recently released a native iPad version as well as an Apple Watch version now.