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"Microsoft Word startup went from about 12 seconds to less than 3." What is it about OSX that makes applications to launch so slowly? Microsoft Word always sta
by old-gregg 16y ago
"Microsoft Word startup went from about 12 seconds to less than 3."
What is it about OSX that makes applications to launch so slowly? Microsoft Word always starts in under 5 seconds on Windows, almost regardless of the hardware, and has been for as long as I can remember. Sluggish application launch was #1 impression after getting an MBP - nothing on it starts like Notepad/Wordpad/Mspaint on Pentium III winbox circa 99.
My gut feeling is that it's dynamic linking. How wrong am I?
- xenophanes 16y agoI don't think microsoft mac apps are a fair test of how fast mac apps start. native apps are better, in general. and for Word in particular, I bet microsoft optimized the hell out of the startup on windows.
- weaksauce 16y agoWord is a native app in osx. Word on the Mac is a completely different piece of software and not a bad port. I read a blog from one of the team members on the word.app team and it showed me that they are very committed to a good product. I doubt they would intentionally slow down the startup of the app just because it's on osx.
- xenophanes 16y agoi've used word on mac, and it kinda sucks (even has data corruption problems). even if microsoft is trying, it doesn't mean they are nearly as good at making mac apps as windows apps (let alone fast mac apps, which is not their area of expertise). and there's a world of difference between "intentionally slow down" (that's crazy) and neglecting to put a ton of work into optimization of startup.
- Qz 16y agoSeveral people I know have told me that Word on Mac was even better than Word on Windows, but that may have been 2003 or 2007.
- lallysingh 16y agoThe current Word for Windows is based on an older Word for Mac source base -- the mac team did that much of a better job. Sorry, no sources, just hearsay from friends who have good info on this.
- Groxx 16y agoFor vague values of "native", yes. They rolled their own interface (which means buttons, events, accessibility tools, text boxes...), dictionary, spell check, grammar check, API, scripting interface, damn near everything. And it integrates extremely poorly with other Mac applications, even screwing up basics. By that logic, Flash apps are native too. So are Java, GTK (on non-GTK-unixes), etc etc until anything that runs on the machine can be considered "native", unless you're remote-controlling another machine through something like SSH/VNC/Remote Desktop. I doubt the developers would intentionally slow down the startup. But I also doubt Microsoft would invest their better/best programmers in optimizing it. But isn't that the same thing as intentionally slowing it down, but from the business's standpoint instead of the developers?
- jdminhbg 16y agoDoesn't MS Office offload some of that load time to startup by running a helper app on login that preloads some stuff? So your tradeoff is boot time vs app launch time.
- barrkel 16y agoI usually kill Office Start and all the other "fast startup" applications that various bits and pieces install, but Word is damn fast to start. I've had occasion to use Word 97 on modern machines - it starts about as fast as Notepad.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jsz0 16y agoI can't say I've noticed that myself. Pages starts instantly on my SSD. Logic, which is a boat of a program, opens along with a project file in about 5 seconds. Word 2008 takes about 5 seconds and also takes an awkward amount of time to close too. Maybe it has something to do with universal binaries? I've always stripped the PPC code out to save some disk space on my (relatively) small SSD. 10.6 ships without the PPC code for all the bundled applications.
- vondur 16y agoFWIW, the current beta of Office 2011 for Mac is much faster to start than Office 2008 for Mac.