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Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

Given how awful performance on my Windows desktop is, I am shocked that Microsoft is still investing in performance.

It's just ridiculous. Windows 11 currently has this bug where the file explorer just freezes all the time. Everyone is experiencing it at work. I cannot believe how a core product gets away with this.

Every time I've investigated an issue like this, it was something outside of explorer. Most of the time some kind of plugin that I didn't want (PDF readers, Tortoise SVN/Git, document preview handlers, you name it), mapped network drives not responding, or file system corruption that went by seemingly unnoticed.

At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality.

I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.

Yup, back when I used windows, my solution to software rot was “just don’t install things that aren’t absolutely essential”

Same goes for OS X now — it seems every OS grows incomprehensible to the company that makes it

Which is sad, because one of the main functions of an OS should be to protect you from misbehaving applications

Linux is a bit better, but I think even the Debian GUI suffers from trying to be convenient/magic rather than predictable/robust

A tale as old as time. It always seemed wild to me File Explorer is allowed to have so much synchronously driven activity. Like sure, display a loading symbol in the content area if I open a network share that's not already mounted (or whatever else it may wait on)... but don't lock the whole darn window so closing it becomes unresponsive!

Process Monitor is invaluable for investigating cases like that - at least one can look at what Windows is actually doing at that moment of freezing:

>Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon ...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

It's usually because there's some non-local stuff on your sidebar that it's trying to load - either a pinned item or a recently opened / frequently opened thing that's on network storage.

It's stupid but Windows has choked on that situation for many years.

It seems they haven't heard of multi threading...

The issue isn’t multithreading. Of course they know that. It’s that they want the UI to show all menu items when you click it (otherwise you’ll say “sometimes PDF Reader is available and sometimes it’s not!!”

Windows doesn’t have performance requirements for most plugins/extensions. It would be great if they did, but it hasn’t been the culture of their ecosystem thus far.

Oh they know about multithreading. The problem is Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility -- the Explorer COM interfaces that third-parties can build shell extensions on are all old enough to be from an era when 99% of users never used Explorer to browse anything on a network so their being synchronous didn't matter, and also from an era when asynchronicity wasn't common and was poorly supported by compilers and when PCs had low enough specs that it didn't make sense to spend the resources to provide asynchronous shell APIs.

And because Explorer continues to support those interfaces today, that means if anything integrates with the shell via those interfaces, Explorer ends up with lots of operations that are forced into being synchronous. You can avoid some of it by being extremely selective about what sorts of shell extensions you let be installed.

You can add as much multi threading as you want, but if you need to wait until all threads are done, the entire window will stall to show you that context menu you requested.

Since I'm not seeing issues like this I'm assuming these are computers on an active directory... I remember XP having a few fun issues like this when a GPO refreshed links to a file that didn't exist and froze for a moment trying to resolve them.

I get this all the time without being on an active directory. It's nothing network related from what I can tell. The explorer tab just stops being interactable seemingly randomly. Closing and reopening the tab works around it.

The reskin of File Explorer in win11 was the most unnecessary thing. Someone's need to justify their job is bringing misery to the masses.

It seems to be almost impossible to have a new explorer window open in your home folder. Instead you get a different Home with duplicates of what's already pinned and visible in the sidebar.

I havent experienced that one myself, but I have other problems with the win 11 explorer. Like how when using the keyboard to navigate the right click menu, you cant just navigate into a submenu, but have to navigatw up or down after navigating into it, then the other way, to select the topmost item. And thats one thing I encounter many times a day at work.

As a heavy Windows keyboard user I've found the level or disrespect for my muscle memory skyrocketed with Windows 10. (I'm frustrated daily with the "Sign out" and "Switch user" in the menu to close Explorer. That stupid choice to rename "Log off" turned a deterministic muscle memory operation into a "now I have to look at the screen" operation.)

And there's also the focus stealing exhibited by office applications. Like the 15 minute reminder of outlook for a teams meeting. That one gets me almost daily.

Not that it makes it any less frustrating to you, but it's probably triggered by something relatively rare/obscure in your environment.

Probably all you can do is keep poking your IT support and hope it goes up the line until someone finds or creates the fix/workaround.

That can happen if you have a mapped network drive which isn't immediately responding or which is offline. If you hover over the drive in Explorer (even accidentally) it will immediately try to query the network location. This can cause massive delay.

Having worked in software for over a decade, I believe it.

Stop using it.

This feels like a "if you don't like where you live just move to a bigger house in a better neighborhood" style response to work related software problems. I.e. many people don't get to choose to run whatever software they'd like to on their work machines, nor are they able to justify changing jobs over control of a bug in the file browser.

Then maybe they actually can believe that Microsoft gets away with it. My comment was multifaceted :P

Ah, I get ya. To me, the hard to believe part is not how individual end users can't solve the problem/pressure Microsoft - it's how enterprise IT teams across the country pay massive licensing/support fees but core parts products like this have regular outstanding hanging bugs of the same family for extended periods over decades. You'd think there would have been enough pressure to make File Explorer more asynchronous by now, given Microsoft are talking about how they still tinker with the low level stuff from decades ago! I know even just mid sized individual companies I've work at have gotten custom patch requests/minor changes in before.

The tough part with (implied) multifaceted comments is nobody can just say things like that, they have to assume what meaning could still make sense to them (which is a dangerous game) or just not engage.

If you can convince corporate to ditch Microsoft and Azure, I'll buy you a beer.

It's really stark when you compare it to something like a linux desktop running KDE or Gnome. Both pretty full featured desktops that were built for the computers I used as a kid.

While there's been a bit of polish, the two simply sip hardware requirements. So much so that you can put them on things like a raspberry pi 3 and still get a decent experience.

It's really funny to me as well. All this effort put into low level performance seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The operating system (and core business software such as Office) is overflowing with bloat that absolutely tanks the performance and responsiveness of the system. On a fresh boot I might as well go for a 15 minute coffee break lest I end up with multiple hung applications blocked on the UI thread.

It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times.

It was quite the shock to me recently when I had to use a Surface Laptop (the ARM one). Snapdragon X Elite & 32GB of RAM and took almost double the time to get to the desktop from a cold start compared to my M2 Air. Then even once everything was loaded, interacting with the system just did not feel responsive at all, the most egregious being file explorer and the right click menu.

And I have my own gripes with macOS feeling like it's slow due to the animations and me wanting to move faster than it can. Windows used to happily oblige, but now it's laggy.

Microsoft is too caught up in shoving Copilot everywhere to care though.

> It's so bad that Microsoft is actually going to start preloading Office on boot to speed up the application start times.

Office has been preloading on startup since Windows 95.

It's bad everywhere. Every time I've upgraded Ubuntu on my old laptop, performance gets worse and worse because more and more junk keeps getting added. Absolutely maddening.

Is it the desktop environment or background stuff that’s getting worse for you? If the former: FWIW I was pleasantly surprised when I switched back to Kubuntu. KDE’s surprisingly resource efficient these days, actually seems pretty close to XFCE.

I'm not sure and don't have the patience to check.

I might go back to Debian. I'm only really using Ubuntu since that and RHEL are what we use at work.

my nixos with just xmonad works really well, I haven't noticed any degradation in the last 10 years of updates.

NixOS looks super cool, but it also looks too much like actual work. As a FreeBSD main for two decades, I've played that game already and have the (sadly, now long dead) tinderbox and poudriere installations to prove it.

The new M$ slop Explorer is horribly optimized and full of unnecessary IPC so no wonder it's so slow.

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