Comment by tjader
3 days ago
I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.
It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff.
I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.
Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider.
And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place?
And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.
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For a more balanced comparison, observe how long it takes for the new "Settings" app to open and how long interactions take, compared to Control Panel, and what's missing from the former that the latter has had for literally decades.
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XP had gray boxes and laggy menus like you wouldn't believe. It didn't even do search in the start menu, and maybe that was for the best because even on an SSD its search functionality was dog slow.
A clean XP install in a VM for nostalgia's sake is fine, but XP as actually used by people for a while quickly ground to a halt because of all the third party software you needed.
The task bar was full of battery widgets, power management icons, tray icons for integrated drivers, and probably at least two WiFi icons, and maybe two Bluetooth ones as well. All of them used different menus that are slow in their own respect, despite being a 200KiB executable that looks like it was written in 1995.
And the random crashes, there were so many random crashes. Driver programmes for basic features crashed all the time. Keeping XP running for more than a day or two by using sleep mode was a surefire way to get an unusual OS.
Modern Windows has its issues but the olden days weren't all that great, we just tolerated more bullshit.
Honestly it behaves like the interface is some Electron app that has to load the visual elements from a little internal webserver. That would be a very silly way to build an OS UI though, so I don't know what Microsoft is doing.
Yep. I suspect GP has just gotten used to this and it is the new “snappy” to them.
I see this all the time with people who have old computers.
“My computer is really fast. I have no need to upgrade”
I press cmd+tab and watch it take 5 seconds to switch to the next window.
That’s a real life interaction I had with my parents in the past month. People just don’t know what they’re missing out on if they aren’t using it daily.
Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow.
Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets its so incredibly slow.
I still remember trying to do photo editing on a Pentium II with a massive 64MB of RAM. Or trying to get decent resolutions scans off a scanner with a Pentium III and 128MB of RAM.
64MB is about the size of (a big) L3 cache. Today's L3 caches have a latency of 3-12ns and throughput measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second. And yet we can't manage to get responsive UIs because of tons of crud.
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The newish windows photo viewer in Win 10 is painfully slow and it renders a lower res preview first, but then the photo seems to move when the full resolution is shown. The photo viewer in windows 7 would prerender the next photo so the transition to the next one would be instant. The is for 24 megapixel photos, maybe 4mb jpegs.
So the quality has gone backwards in the process of rewriting the app into the touch friendly style. A lot of core windows apps are like that.
Note that the windows file system is much slower than the linux etx4, I don't know about Mac filesystems.
This one drives me nuts.
I have to stay connected to VPN to work, and if I see VPN is not connected I click to reconnect.
If the VPN button hasn't loaded you end up turning on Airplane mode. Ouch.
Windows 11 shell partly uses React Native in the start button flyout. It's not a heavily optimized codebase.
That's the point. It's so bloated that an entirely local operation that should be instantaneous takes over 1 second.
No, it's a heavily pessimized codebase.