Comment by Cthulhu_
4 days ago
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.
As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here.
And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse?
And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the click six hours later, wouldn't people then complain about how obviously bloated it was? How is this not a constant battle of being unable to appease any critics until we're back at the Win 3.1 state of things with no Bluetooth devices, no WiFi networks, no dynamic changing or audio devices, etc?
And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.
10 replies →
You hit on something there, I could type faster than my 2400 baud connection but barring a bad connection those connections were pretty reliable.
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.
I'm far faster changing my default audio device with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Sound > Right click audio device > Set as Default. Now I just click the quick settings > the little sound device icon > chosoe a device.
I'm far faster changing my WiFi network with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center (if using Vista or newer) > Network Devices > right click network adapter > Connect / Disconnect > go through Wizard process to set up new network. Now I just click the quick settings, click the little arrow to list WiFi networks, choose the network, click connect. Way faster.
I'm also generally far faster finding whatever setting in the Settings menu over trying to figure out which tab on which little Control Panel widget some obscure setting is, because there's a useful search box that will pull up practically any setting these days. Sure, maybe if you had every setting in Control Panel memorized you could be faster, but I'm far faster just searching for the setting I'm looking for at the moment for anything I'm not regularly changing.
The new Settings area, now that it actually has most things, is generally a far better experience unless you had everything in Control Panel committed to muscle memory. I do acknowledge though there are still a few things that aren't as good, but I imagine they'll get better. For most things most users actually mess with on a regular basis, it seems to me the Settings app is better than Control Panel. The only thing that really frustrates me with Settings now on a regular basis is only being able to have one instance of the app open at a time, a dumb limitation.
Every time I'm needing to mess with something in ancient versions of Windows these days is now a pain despite me growing up with it. So many things nested in non-obvious areas, things hidden behind tab after tab of settings and menus. Right click that, go to properties, click that, go to properties on that, click that button, go to the Options tab, click Configure, and there you go that's where you set that value. Easy! Versus typing something like the setting you want to set into the search box in Settings and have it take you right to that setting.
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.