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Comment by martin_ky | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some http request. I noticed that often the online version of these apps (namely Outlook) are more responsive than the desktop counterparts.

Edit: My experience with Excel - https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20

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I guess it's because in web context, it's easier to do web calls async than sync. While it's perfectly possible to do async web calls in something like C++, or at least move stuff to a different thread, people just somehow don't. Maybe out of lazyness since the first Google result was sync, or because lifecycle management is harder if raw pointers are involved, or whatever else.

I'm guilty of this. Back when I was writing Java apps using Swing, I'd perform heavy blocking IO operations in button event handlers synchronously. Looking back, I realise how much haram I was committing.

It's because the default program structure in C and C++ makes functions blocking, with the caller assuming that if the callee returned it completed. Jamming a non-blocking program structure smack in the middle of a blocking system is never pretty, and most people prefer not to deal with the additional complexity. For the same reason, even though Windows has overlapped IO and other asynchronous IO mechanisms, most people prefer to use the synchronous functions.

For disk IO you usually get away with it, especially now with SSDs. For networking you don't even have to use overlapped IO, sockets can be used with window messages, winhttp can be used async, etc. I think "it's more involved" is a really shitty excuse, especially if we're talking about a Microsoft product, not some obscure shareware software a guy is developing in his shed in the middle of nowhere.

I'm not excusing this particular case, I'm just explaining the perspective of most developers regarding synchronous versus asynchronous operations. In this particular case there's no reason to do it synchronously, since multiple processes are involved anyway. The crash handler should definitely not be waiting on a network operation to let the process terminate (that's not even getting into whether crash dumps should be getting uploaded by default to begin with), and the fact that this is a central part of the operating system's UI is even more egregious.

In some cases I wonder if the Office team had internal coding policies against threading because they aren’t sure about thread safety on some legacy structures. I remember reporting the issues Outlook had blocking UI waiting on network calls in the Office 97 beta (oh, was I an optimistic teenager) and multiple decades later that’s still affecting users.

I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...

The new calc app has always been a travesty. Taking at least a full second or more to load, with an obnoxiously large interface. The original calculator opened instantly and had a completely functional ui. I get angry every time I need to launch calculator on a machine I have not configured with SpeedCrunch. Almost better to use Excel.

I open the full bloody GNU Octave instead. I just timed it.

Calculator: 13s Octave GUI: 5s

The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.

> The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.

I can't stand this and it happens in a lot of places. It seems like pure metric chasing. We made it load faster boss. Well, no you can't use it but it yet but you should have been more specific!

If I open word doc over the slow VPN Word forces itself to the foreground only to show me a file loading dialog.

I will gladly hate on the calculator redesign, but 13 seconds feels like there is some other underlying issue.

Ye, probably architectural problem that somehow surfaces on my work laptop.

I googled abit and there seems to be people that have problem with load time of these system UWP apps.

"I just tested out the calculator again. Took 7 seconds to be usable."

It's also worse for mixed keyboard and mouse operation [1], because some of the buttons (2nd, the trigonometry, functions and history submenus) now retain input focus after clicking on them, so pressing Enter operates that button again instead of completing your calculation.

[1] If you can't remember the shortcuts for some of the more obscure functions – never mind that they're also badly documented and you have to find the list of shortcuts by searching for them yourself on the web. I have a memory that way back – possibly not even in Windows 7, but only XP – the calculator included an offline help with all the keyboard shortcuts listed. Nowadays the Windows 10 calculator doesn't include any sort of help at all, not even a link to the online help.

> Almost better to use Excel.

Ouch! I hope you mean Excel 2010 or earlier; all the later ones are so slow to launch or open document that I tend to leave Excel and files (that I'll need to access quickly) open until something forces a reboot or until I bork Excel's state by QAing or triaging somebody's unfortunate VBA (sometimes even mine, too; shhh!). This remained true on a performant gaming computer while working from home. It was always a delight, remoting into somebody's machine that still had a functional Excel 2010 on it.

I always install tne old calculator: https://win7games.com/#calc

Ty. It is depressing to read that list actually. Windows felt so much more fresh with those innocent apps like Minesweeper and Paint.

"Microsoft has removed the classic calculator app starting in Windows 10 and replaced it with a new UWP app that receives updates from the Store."

Ah I see. Remote code execution. Maybe it was a Store update that broke it for me, not Windows update.

That site is an amazing resource, thank you. I was having trouble finding a solitaire for my grandfather's new laptop

See also https://winaero.com/ for general Windows UI tweaking.

I hate the slow right click menu too, why is there a forced delay?

I think visual design peaked a few years ago and now we are deliberately overcomplicating every piece of UI for no apparent reason.

My favourite scapegoat is the agile dev process.

It takes away freedom and agency for devs which makes small things also suck where mainly complex things needing multiple programmers did without agile.

Since agile is so process heavy.

I imagine there are no dev owner of calc.exe anymore at MS.

They ruined paint.exe too btw.

I wonder how much improvement can be had by installing an application firewall and restricting everything that doesn't need networking for its primary functionality.

Not much. A lot of this sort of functionality is offloaded onto opaquely named services. So now you have decide if some access should or should not be allowed; but with very little information as to what process will in the end use that access. I used Glasswire for a long time, and when you install it on a new machine you get a lot of allow/block notifications; but then if you go back and look at the 'rule set' that was build up that way some months later, it's really hard to see what was blocked for what reason and if you actually should be blocking it.

One example is embedded IE/Edge views. It seems that those are a process of its own (sometimes), likely out-of-process COM instances. But if you want to allow one program to access the network that way but not another one, well there is (to my knowledge, and I haven't really looked into this) no way to do that. Same for the 'background download' service, the search service mentioned in the OP (although that's only used internally by Windows afaik, but by several sub-components), etc.

Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Whether that's by design I don't know. I blame engineers and marketing/product people equally for not showing enough restraint (i.e. the trope of 'just because they could... asked if they should...' etc). But nobody cares about my opinion on this, and the majority of users don't realize or care - and even if they do, they're as powerless as I am, individually.

It's been a while since I used Windows with any kind of seriousness (and the last version I did was 7), so I wasn't aware that this kind of thing is offloaded to separate, shared processes like that.

> Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality.

Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet. Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files. No one I know uses any of the cloud crap they added in the latest versions. The only use case when networking might be needed in Word/Excel/Powerpoint — and even then, it's most probably handled by a system service — is printing to a networked printer.

(when working with a file stored on a remote server, shared over SMB or something similar, that's definitely handled by the system and appears as a local file to applications, albeit on a very slow disk)

"Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet."

shrug I think the same, but it's a fact that new versions of Word heavily integrate with Sharepoint and Teams. I don't use that functionality (at least not a lot), but for some businesses it's the primary use case, and it's how Word can manage to stay relevant even when competing with Google Docs. The concept of 'files' is going away slowly anyway, like it or not. (I don't, but again, nobody ever asked me). There's more - like, when you install a new spell checking language pack, something accesses the internet. It's most likely the installer/automatic updater 'service' that does this, but then you're again in the 'what's this process for anyway' territory.

My point - I think your view on how software 'should' behave is the same as mine, but the reality is that our view is outdated. It's just not how software works in 2023.

It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.

I did just block Word from accessing the network at all. I guess I'll find out over the next few days in what ways it will break.

(that's another thing - most software nowadays doesn't even handle not having network access gracefully any more, if at all. Sometimes you just get blank parts of a window (presumably when embedded HTML views silently fail) and there is no way to 'reload' those parts of the UI. Or windows that don't open at all, so it just looks like a button doesn't do anything. And so on. It's disgraceful and like I said upthread, many of today's engineers just think it's normal, or are told to implement it that way against their own convictions. I mean I understand why things are they are, I just don't agree with the lack of effort in fighting back against the drivers of that outcome.)

> It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.

I don't know glasswire, but on Commodo firewall you can set a rule to allow access to your local network by default (or any range of IPs) and ask about external access, which would be a way to solve your problem with explorer.

Yeah I should probably look into it more. Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? What I needed from Glasswire was click-to-allow on each network access, I couldn't find that in any product I tried a few years ago before I decided on Glasswire.

> Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus?

Yep, just pick the firewall from the installers and make sure you uncheck everything except the firewall during the install (they are tricky, these guys):

* https://forums.comodo.com/news-announcements-feedback-cis/co...

after installing go through and (again) disable everything but the firewall. I also use their firewall to block their firewall (hah) from updating. Once you do this it works fine as a standalone firewall and the only reason to ever update it is if you reinstall or upgrade Windows.

EDIT: It does per-app blocking great; that's why I use it. I tried glasswire and didn't like it (or maybe they wanted to charge me money, I forget).

You might enjoy Safing's Portmaster Firewall then: https://safing.io/

It's open source and is quickly surpassing GlassWire's capabilities.

Disclaimer: I'm Founder/CTO of Safing.

I am a bit confused about Portmaster and Safing. The documentation on Safing constantly refers to Portmaster. Does portmaster do anything besides act as a local firewall?

There are 3 big parts:

- The firewall itself with rules, filter lists, and so on - https://safing.io/features/

- Secure DNS (DoT/DoH resolver) - https://safing.io/features/

- "SPN": Optional paid VPN alternative similar to Tor, our source of revenue - https://safing.io/spn/

I'm pretty sure you can actually configure the windows firewall the same way, but you would have to it up front, instead of having it prompt you.

explorer.exe is also responsible for the Windows "shell" (Start menu, taskbar, system tray, desktop background), at least historically. I think more of this started to be done by Metro and UWP subprocesses since Windows 8. (But explorer.exe is ultimately still important—if you kill its process, you lose everything but alt-tab and control-shift-escape). So I'm not too surprised that it would request network access given how much it's doing.

> Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files

That might have been the case 20 years ago (and even then Office had functionality to self-update).

Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents.

Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now—VS Code can download and update itself and any extensions, connect to remote SSH hosts and GitHub Codespaces, use extensions that themselves connect to the Internet (like Copilot), etc.

People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs (consider Rufus, an ISO burning program which can update itself, download ISOs to burn to USB drives, etc), and it’s counterproductive to just blanket-ban everything from accessing the Internet, as things are likely to stop working as expected.

> Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents.

How many people do actually use these features in these programs? I myself have always seen them as nothing but bloat, a symptom of the IT industry utterly lacking a notion of a project being finished and not needing any further work. Maybe these features should come as plugins that you can optionally install. At least that's how I'd do it.

Usually, when someone wants to collaboratively edit a document or a spreadsheet, they use Google Docs. It being web-first also helps.

> Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now

And as an Android developer, I despise how Android Studio, or the Gradle Android plugin, or both of them, can just shamelessly download 100-something megabytes of some crap without asking, expecting that you have a network connection capable of that, sometimes not even showing the fact that they're accessing the network in the UI, and refusing to operate if that download fails. Eclipse didn't do that. Though it was terrible in many other ways.

> People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs

Honestly, I expect smallest programs to be complete and not need any updating.

Wouldn't that make things worse? Those applications usually expect to be able to make these calls. So now, instead of lagging once in a while when the home base is having troubles, it will lag all the time.

It shouldn't, because any network requests would fail early and instantly, somewhere around opening the socket.

> Wouldn't that make things worse? Those applications usually expect to be able to make these calls. So now, instead of lagging once in a while when the home base is having troubles, it will lag all the time.

Not necessarily. The lag may be waiting for the remote server to respond to a request, and the app may move on quickly if it can't open a connection at all. It's not totally uncommon to work totally offline (e.g. on an airplane), so there's a decent chance the test that scenario.

In my experience, each time a firewall is blocking a connection, you experience it as a timeout, so the app tries to connect and finally times out.

Which would take longer. I haven't tried though

It depends entirely on how the firewall is set up.

If you are getting timeouts then the folks who set up the firewall hate you.

No, it usually results in an immediate connection refused.

it won't wait for a timeout if the connection is explicitly dropped by a blocking rule

It can be the case that an immediate, explicit failure is faster than waiting for success (or worse, timing out).

This is actually one of the things that I appreciate from React. Because the view is synchronous you need to explicitly bail out on loading states (`return <ProgressSpinner/>`). In general you are presented the option to do something while the async work is running and other parts of the UI almost always work.

The option exists in C# / WPF, too, so not handling it and just blocking the main thread is bad programming.

General question for the class... Is there any way to stop this? Is there some entries we can add to the hosts file so that Windows and Office will instantly return as failed, rather than timing out?

Hosts file would be your first way assuming you trust MS to honor that convention. You can always consider using a way that is not reliant on Windows goodwill ( for example, Pihole would allow you to limit various unwanted IPs based on your custom list; technically, your router should be able to do it too, but it varies wildly by mfctr/model ). That said, I am not that familiar with that functionality in Excel and it is not a given that it would fail gracefully if it is actually stopped from calling mothership.

I've been running a PiHole for a couple of years now and love it. It's hard to go on anyone else's network.

I use W10Privacy. It blocks all MS servers except those needed to get updates and antivirus definitions.

That looks like exactly what I was looking for, cheers. Windows auto-identifies the download as a virus, but I see the author has a page about this frustration on the website.

If you want to put in the effort you can sniff the hostname lookups and if it's done halfway dedicated name, as an entry for 0.0.0.0 to the hosts file.

That exchange with the Microsoft support account is just such a facepalm.

happens a bunch on mobile for me too. if I'm on unreliable wifi / cellular, it's easier to go into airplane mode than wait for Spotify to try to complete a remote call when searching my library

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