3 ms·

Well, if you want to go down this road, let's really talk about the entire right-click menu paradigm. I do almost all of my development on a personal MBP, but I

Well, if you want to go down this road, let's really talk about the entire right-click menu paradigm. I do almost all of my development on a personal MBP, but I make sure that my work PC laptop can _do_ everything I would need it to do for my job. On this minimally-functional, bog-standard corporate Dell machine, it takes about a third of a second to bring up the right-click menu. Juuust enough time to make you wait. There are TWENTY-EIGHT menu items, NINE of which are sub-menu openers. The menu is so tall that it takes 7/8ths the height of the screen, so I can't reliably know at what item the cursor will be lying at when it appears, and I have to think about it. This supposed "convenience" has now become an actual impediment to productivity. I suppose I should be thankful. Before the last refresh, there were so many items in the right-click menu that it was taller than the internal LCD could display, and I would need to scroll to get to the bottom. Sure, the Mac has right-click (and I don't like how it embeds a possibly-very-long file name on the "compress" item), but the entire _way_ you work with files on a Mac doesn't rely on it. Windows has centered it's workflow on right-click, so their right-click menu is critical to using it in anger. Every time I need to do something on that machine, I'm just glad to stop and go back to my Mac. EDIT: I used Windows Explorer for these figures, because that's what everyone has. I just did the same thing in Directory Opus, which I use as a replacement. It took longer to open the right-click menu, and has 4 more items. I should run a poll: how many items are in your right-click menus in Explorer? How many of them are just "convenience" placeholders for things you would normally be doing with dragging-and-dropping between targets IN THE PROGRAM? How many are "convenience" items for compression-related tasks? I suppose I could remove a bunch of these right-click menu item targets if I did some research on how.

jiggawatts 5y ago
Microsoft's error was the dynamic DLL part of the whole thing. They should have used a simple rules engine with which programs can register an icon, text, and an action. Processing ~1 KB of contiguously stored rules for each right-click would take less than 1ms even on the slowest budget laptop running on battery. There are many similar design decisions in Windows that cause many orders of magnitude slowdown. For example, start menu indexing is also absurdly slow, despite processing only about 100 KB of data in total.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Microsoft's error was the dynamic DLL part of the whole thing. They should have used a simple rules engine with which programs can register an icon, text, and an action. Processing ~1 KB of contiguously stored rules for each right-click would take less than 1ms even on the slowest budget laptop running on battery. There are many similar design decisions in Windows that cause many orders of magnitude slowdown. For example, start menu indexing is also absurdly slow, despite processing only about 100 KB of data in total.