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Comment by dada78641 | Hacker News Reader

> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch.

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

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When they rewrite it, I’m afraid we’ll get an iPad-esque nerfed and incomplete monstrosity, like we have with the Home or Settings apps.

Exactly my thought. When they replace Finder, it’ll almost certainly be with a port of the useless iPad Files app.

Apple unfortunately isn’t in the business of making powerful, efficient (user-facing) software anymore.

Based on how well the System Preferences → Settings rewrite went: please don't.

They did apparently rewrite it in Cocoa back in ~2008. Although that was 16 years ago so I'm sure it's accumulated a fair bit of tech debt since then.

>The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing

Say what you will about Windows, but the Explore file manager has always been pretty rock solid.

I will say, network drives feel local on Windows. On macOS they feel like network drives. I think I’d say the same about external drives. I stopped using them, because I got sick of waiting for them to spin up anytime Finder had to do some work.

Up until 7, and even afterward in some areas, Windows got things right from an interface standpoint. People seem to forgot that Microsoft dumped large amounts of time and money into figuring out how people use computers and developed their desktop environment accordingly. I've used Windows, macOS, and more Linux DEs than I care to admit. The only thing that tops the Windows DE is KDE, which isn't a massive departure from Windows. macOS has legacy as an excuse, but I don't know what can be said about the various Linux DEs that don't Work Right for the sake of spiting ideas that do.

Windows 11 has pretty severely fucked up Explorer. Named directories can't have their path copied (I think 10 did this bullshit, too). The context menu getting insane whitespace, missing options, and having things dynamically load into it is a travesty. It is heartbreaking that mobile-inspired trash is ultimately going to be way you're forced to interact with a computer.

People let their distaste for somebody's bad behavior and/or old things stop them from admitting that we're in a pretty severe backward slide.

Dynamically-loaded context options (with any user-perceptible lag whatsoever) has to be one the greatest UX sins I can think of. Like apps stealing focus on startup (looking at you, Adobe!)

> with any user-perceptible lag whatsoever

About that part... Modern computers are insanely fast. How does every single piece of software manages to fill half a minute of CPU or disk I/O for enumerating some 3 or 4 items?

It's absurd.

I use Firefox inside eatmydata nowadays, because it spends 10 minutes enumerating the same 2 directories every time it starts up (hundreds of thousands of times). The start menu and equivalents everywhere are already famous. Windows can't search files nowadays, not only it doesn't work, but it never ends either... The list is endless.

> I use Firefox inside eatmydata nowadays, because it spends 10 minutes enumerating the same 2 directories every time it starts up (hundreds of thousands of times).

What have you got like a 10 year old profile or something?

Librewolf starts up instantly for me, and I saw no performance difference using eatmdata.

Why would an old profile cause it to be scanned hundreds of thousands of times? (Yeah, I'm resetting it next time just in case... 10 years is amateur's numbers :) )

Anyway, there are a lot of people reporting the same thing on the internet. I've found 3 different bugs opened for the same thing.

But yeah, as far as I remember, Iceweasel doesn't do it either. Maybe I should change my browser.

Explorer can’t even sort folders by size…

That's because folders have no size. It requires calculating children size recursively.

It could be done quickly by reading the MFT. WizTree can calculate the size of all 236k directories/800k files on my system in two seconds. For some reason, Explorer takes ~10 seconds to calculate the size of a single directory (Program Files, 17k directories, 240k files). If Explorer just did what WizTree does, it could actually show and sort by directory sizes.

You're saying the size of the folder's contents is its size? Wow, that would sure be useful information for a file explorer to expose.

Hmm. Wasn't it completely unreliable for moving around large numbers of files at the same time? Like if file #243 of 400 failed for some reason, you could actually lose data?

I don't know any more because I use Total Commander on Windows...

I'm not aware of any bugs like that. Got any links maybe?

No, it may have been windows 95 :)

I prefer the good ole two pane file managers and I actively avoid both the finder and explorer most of the time.

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