6 ms·
The Windows 96 Story
- mrweasel 5y agoSadly Windows 96 in a browser is more responsive that Windows 10 on real hardware.
- fb03 5y agoI'd dare to say it is as snappy as i remembered win95 to be
- agumonkey 5y ago10$ bet: nobody was disappointed by win95 latency when booting their old 586 era machine
- canadianfella 5y ago$ before the numbers. $10.
- __del__ 5y agowin95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster.
- jsjohnst 5y ago> win95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster. Win95 debuted into an era when 486 was still the most common processor and 586 (aka Pentium) was just building steam. Windows 3.11 was faster on a 486 than Windows 95, so I’m guessing you mistakenly advanced processor generations in your comment.
- cptskippy 5y agoI would argue that Sleep and Hibernation came about because booting Windows took so long.
- agumonkey 5y agolast time i booted a win95 machine I was happy waiting during the splash screen :D I guess you have a point, I was mostly remembering the desktop part, I was surprised how the limited GUI felt snappier than my latest laptop with xfce and didn't lack much important features
- cptskippy 5y agoI can't remember the last time I booted Win95 but I remember the first. I had installed a Cyrix 586 overdrive chip in my Lazer 486sx 33mhz system that was maxed out with 32mb of RAM. It took forever and I wasn't sure if it would work.
- krige 5y agoHaving used win98 back on a Pentium 200 I was flabbergasted by how sluggish and prone to delay it was. Coming from AmigaOS there were jarring delays everywhere, even for something as simple as opening the Start Menu. God forbid I set an jpg wallpaper, Active Desktop murdered performance.
- vetinari 5y agoOne of the jokes at the time was: What is Windows? An i386 emulator for Pentium.
- chrisco255 5y agoSnappier, even. And it boots up faster. I remember Windows 98 taking 3-5 minutes to boot up.
- wongarsu 5y agoI remember Win98 opening the start menu instantly, but taking annoyingly long to open the "all programs" menu. Considering that this distinction is removed in Win10, Win10 on a 500GB SSD is snappier in that regard than Win98 was on a 3GB HDD.
- FerretFred 5y agoI agree!
- tored 5y agoWhat kind of hardware do you run? Mechanical drive? I have an ancient machine but with SSD, Windows 10 is still snappy.
- TheFreim 5y agoI switched a while back to Linux and like my setup much better than what I can do on windows but I think a lot of the "windows is slow" stuff is overblown. I temporarily had windows installed the other day and it was just fine in terms of being "snappy".
- ycuser2 5y agoOpening context menu of task bar items takes about 500 ms here with SDD and i7.
- tored 5y agoThat is an operation I never do. I guess slowness can be attributed to that the menu is application aware, customizable menu options per application. But there is also a slow animation when opening the menu. And on top of that as soon as you hover above an item in the taskbar it wants to show a thumbnail preview of that window. All combined the user interaction feels a bit weird. I turned off "Animations in the taskbar" and I think the context menu got somewhat faster.
- mdre 5y agoDo you have many shell extensions installed? Try disabling some items on the context menu.
- asicsp 5y agoRelated discussion from 5 days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27978463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27978463
- krige 5y ago>Gates correctly recognized that browsers were the last app we’d learn how to use, that so much of the software to come would be browser-based SaaS. Is it really the correct context for Gates' statement of "You just learn one thing, and that’s the browser"? I really don't think browser-run software was a thing for long while yet. I thought he meant the initial internet hype as the source of -information-.
- qwerty456127 5y agoWhatever, browser-based apps still are apps, not necessarily easier than native apps. A browser essentially is a launcher with its own UI toolkit and discovery mechanism. Open GMail, Google Docs or whatever, hide the address bar and you essentially get an ordinary app you still have to learn.
- robbedpeter 5y agoThere are significantly more constraints within the browser than inside a general os environment, though. It's becoming less of a difference, but there are important contexts and operations lost by browser apps.
- AstralStorm 5y agoAn ordinary app with half the integration, third of features, twice the bugs and few supported formats.
- qwerty456127 5y agoSure, but this is irrelevant to the context. Mr. Gates said the browser is the last app to learn. Saying it's the last operating system would make much more sense. Apps are still there and not going away.
- cztomsik 5y agoGiven how much MS was into developers I would say this was more about learning just one set of APIs.
- 5y ago
- pcthrowaway 5y agoIf they manage to get some working software that runs in Kiosk mode, they might actually get a lot of people using it, not just as a novelty
- 1_player 5y agoGiven the poster's history, this definitely is a subtle way of promoting their latest blogging platform.
- l30n4da5 5y agototally thought this was a dev blog for the Racket language. Was tying to figure out why the devs of Racket would be blogging about Windows 96 in the browser....
- legrande 5y agoWindows93 and Windows96 work best in a fullscreen Window. Press F11 to enjoy them properly.
- zekrioca 5y agoAlthough not full operating systems, since at least 2005 there were also some solid systems using similar concepts (not Windows though), like eyeOS [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS