Comment by tjader
4 days ago
> 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?
Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without having to wait one second even if the button is not enabled yet, and by the time my mouse reaches it it will probably be enabled.
> 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.
I've never seen the volume slider in Windows 98 take one second to render. Not even the start menu, which is much more complex, and which in Windows 11 often takes a second, and search results also show up after a random amount of time and shuffle the results around a few times, leading to many misclicks.
It doesn't even know if the devices are still attached (as it potentially hasn't tried interfacing them for hours) but should instantly be able to allow input to control them and fully understand their current status. Right. Makes sense.
And if you don't remember the volume slider taking several seconds to render on XP you must be much wealthier than me or have some extremely rose colored glasses. I play around with old hardware all the time and get frustrated with the unresponsiveness of old equipment with period accurate software, and had a lot of decent hardware (to me at least) in the 90s and 00s. I've definitely experienced lots of times of the start menu painting one entry after the other at launch, taking a second to roll out, seeking on disk for that third level menu in 98, etc.
Rose colored glasses, the lot of you. Go use an old 386 for a month. Tell me how much more productive you are after.