PSA: The Roblox App Beta for Windows is Chugging Along!

Something I noticed when using this a few weeks ago, when joining a game from the website, the app would briefly load its main page and it’d increase loading time a bit while it did that, and, that got pretty annoying pretty fast with how much I was joining games for debugging and testing and such.

I’m curious to know if this has been fixed.

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A lot of people seem to forget that literally every OS has a task switching feature which prevents this. On Windows its Alt+Tab, on Mac its Command+Tab. And, regardless, you can’t really get trapped in a game in the app, it works the same way as playing in fullscreen, which, a lot of people do. If a game freezes while you’re in the app, you can also bring up the “This window is not responding” prompt and kill it on Windows, all it takes is clicking a few times on the window.

I agree that it’s annoying the app doesn’t have a non-fullscreen mode though.

What problems are you having that V-Sync would fix?

Correct me if I’m wrong, I think that Roblox at least is effected by D3D11 V-Sync settings, as, toggling them in my AMD options does seem to effect how the game appears to display (a lot less appealing to me for some reason). It does not effect the framerate shown in Roblox’s debug menus though.

I also don’t think V-Sync is necessary anyways, for some reason, because I have never seen screen tearing happening in Roblox, but, have seen it happen in other games before. I think with Roblox’s D3D11 mode at least, the frame is probably drawn to a buffer before its displayed on the screen, and I guess the speed that the buffer can be copied to the GPU is fast enough for screen tearing not to be a problem with my GPU. It probably wouldn’t be a problem with other GPUs either.

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I don’t exactly like this, your forcing a beta onto people who may not want it.

Does that mean that I’ll be able to use the workaround to get it and itll affect my experience?


Also, @goldzun any idea when you will stop using Internet Explorer for the beta? It’s a legacy piece of software now.


This application is not new though, it’s the same as the mobile app, but its just a bit different. This comment explains it all:

Yeah, it is a slight issue, only happens when you’re in full screen. I do think this move is to make it easier to use for newer players.

Just want to quote this tweet from Portuguese DevRel relating to that post

Yeah, wish Roblox would keep it consistant and stop using IE for this.

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May I ask why staff are still resorting to releasing it to % exclusively? You have thousands of people who opted directly into the Beta Program to get access to stuff like this and till this day Its barely used at all, Cool I get 700 max players in my server and thats really about it but when am I truely gonna have 700 people in my game?

Even if they released the option to people who did opt into beta + a % of users that’ll clear up so many issues. We opted into beta to gain access to new features to try out these new features and yet its still useless.

If not even official staff members are taking the Beta Program into effect and using the members that opted into it is it really necessary for it to stick around?

That was the main issue I had with DisplayNames when it was in beta is they kept releasing it in waves and you had tons of Beta Members who still didn’t have access to it.

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Good point, however, it’s still unofficial. Other than that tweet, Roblox never mentions that anywhere, either in official announcements or help articles. It’s clear this method isn’t meant to be mainstream.

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Sorry, I didn’t see that. I’m sorry if I interrupted anyone. Anyway, thanks for the help!

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Any way to make that pop-up never show up again when you are about to close the Roblox client?

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Nothing? V-sync isn’t just related with screen tearing, it’s also related with locking max. FPS to monitor refresh rate which they said might come later.

Yeah everyone commented on this knows that already. They just make some things harder.

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I actually caught the Windows app a couple of months ago. I have a couple of issues, like VR support not implemented and the settings interface being a little clunky compared to the original, but I love it!

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V-Sync is just related to screen tearing, its entire purpose is syncing the game’s framerate with the monitor’s refresh rate to avoid tearing, which, does not necessarily mean increasing the frame cap. You can have V-Sync at 30 FPS due to performance being slow, even if a monitor’s refresh rate is 120hz. It just doesn’t make sense for V-Sync to have functionality to intentionally reduce frame rate, so it doesn’t.

The reason that V-Sync limits the framerate to your monitor’s refresh rate is a side effect of the way V-Sync works anyways, when a frame is drawn, its held until the monitor is ready to draw it, and, this is completely possible within Roblox at a capped 60 FPS even if your monitor has a refresh rate of 120hz.

So, what you’re asking for is not V-Sync, you’re asking about the FPS cap being more flexible, which, like you said is already something that was discussed coming to Roblox in the future, and can already be achieved unofficially with tools like FPSUnlocker, which, has been given the okay from Roblox.

This is kind of a broad statement and not really true, but, you’re expressing close to exactly what my point was. It is well known that you can use task switching to get out of fullscreen programs, which is exactly what I was pointing out. You can’t get trapped in a game from a lack of a windowed mode.

What you are asking for is to have a windowed mode, because you don’t want to need to use task switching.

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I dislike how in full screen mode when you hover around the top, this shows up:

It is very annoying especially when I’m trying to click on chat or something in the topbar.

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I remember getting the desktop app in December 2020 on alt account and I like it a lot. A small problem that’s pretty dang annoying and I’ve had for months is that, when you press Escape key, then you press “L” key, then when you press “Enter”, it doesn’t leave the game… This makes leaving games a couple of seconds slower and it’s super annoying. Also, I saw a couple people speedrunning leaving those games that “you couldn’t leave” and if there’s not “Enter/Return” button functionality, then it would make “speedrunning” leaving a game a lot harder, and since the average young player probably doesn’t know about the “X” button on a window, they won’t know how to leave the game. Next thing: A Twitch streamer @RadVideo opted out of the Roblox desktop app recently because whenever he would close a game with the “X” button, it would say “Explore more experiences!” which really annoyed him so he opted out and also noticed that his camera sensitivity was just perfect and how he wanted it RIGHT after he opted out. And also, a while ago, I heard somebody say that VR wouldn’t work properly with the Desktop App because it isn’t supported. Here is the full post if you would like to read it. Basically, there’s not a VR toggle on the Windows beta app and VR doesn’t even work. They said it wouldn’t work in Studio either, so it might be something with their computer or something, but just make sure there aren’t any bugs with that just in case. ALSO, you guys should work on replacing those Internet Explorer pages with actual pages in the app. Let me show you an example of what I mean:


As you can see, it’s showing in an Internet Explorer window, rather than an actual Windows app page, like the homepage:

Also thank you SO MUCH for adding friend activity back :slight_smile:
Anyways, there’s one more thing that’s pretty small but it would match up with the website:
Change usernames to display names on the home page, or prefix them with an “@”.
We’ve noticed on the Roblox WEBSITE that it shows your friends’ display names instead of their usernames. So, it should show this on the app too! ONE more thing. Promise. Please add a puzzle piece icon either in the “…” menu or right below the “…” button. This button will open a menu that will let you install EXTENSIONS. Since a lot of people use Chrome extensions, they should add extensions/plugins to the Desktop App. I am sure that you can’t load in Chrome extension folders and it to actually work, so maybe there will be a custom language for making extensions? Like a file named TestExtension.roplugin could simply be loaded in inside of the menu, similar to how you can load in an APK file into an Android emulator. You can also put this file on the marketplace, but it should probably have to be reviewed and tested by moderators to avoid spam. Maybe these “.roplugin” files will just have that file extension because why not, but they should be written in Lua maybe. That was my feedback and it was pretty long.

EDIT: Also I was able to do this, but I haven’t been able to anymore recently. The thing that I can’t do is click on the semi-transparent black space to close out the pause menu. Here is what I mean:


I’m clicking in this space but it’s not closing the menu. I remember I was able to do this when I first got the beta app but for some reason they decided to remove it…?

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I’m with you on this one… something about the giant mobile style interface really doesn’t sit well with me.

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I was (unfortunately) eligible for this beta thanks to an alt account I used and then this thing followed me to all my other alts and my main.

I HATE this mobile-first UI. PC Monitors aren’t touchscreens. It honestly feels like it was ripped off of the mobile app. For example, there’s this big ribbon bar at the left. There’s so much unused space. Instead of adding more categories to that corner, you kept the three dot option which hides several other features. I’m also not going to mention the fact that you can’t see your Robux without selecting the button.

The experience in-game is terrible, as well. The Esc menu looks modern and beautiful, but it’s honestly slowing my workflow down. It takes me more time to enable Shift Lock Switch and developer tools are also hidden under an “Advanced Settings” button which I have to click.

But when it comes to the in-game experience, the problems I stated above aren’t this much of a big deal. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is the “Explore new games” prompt which appears EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to close the app. No “Don’t show this pop-up again” option. I can understand that having a confirmation may be useful for some people that could accidentally close the app, but I’m not one of them. I regularly hop through games either for testing purposes or just for fun, and I have to say I find this prompt EXTREMELY annoying.

I’m honestly not going to summarize what I just said, I feel this is a waste of time. I’m only going to mention that when I found the Opt out button, I literally felt blessed and saved from a literal disaster. I’m not going to use the Beta app until these issues get fixed.

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I don’t like how its basically and copy and paste of the mobile app, plus i feel like it takes to long to certain pages.

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They just should remaster the current one but with more morden gui, and maybe an bit different.

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Agree, this is annoying, also that Roblox runs in the background 10-30sec even when I close the app is annoying as I could still hear the game.

Tho during those 10-30sec I’m still on the server for some reason.

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Not exactly, you can opt-out anytime.

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This happens normally anyways

Not everyone knows how to opt out

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That’s not Roblox forcing a beta on people, that’s Roblox not being clear enough on how to disable it.

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