17 ms·

No Start Menu for You

427 points by jabagawee 4y ago

LightHugger 4y ago
It probably hasn't been addressed because user experience is depressingly low priority for microsoft... And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.
- martin_ky 4y ago
  I'd say the reality is even more ironic - they collect so much data and reports, pretending this is to help to improve the user experience, but in the end it makes the experience so much worse.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    It still irks me to no end when a Microsoft product asks me to rate my experience. Teams is constantly badgering me to rate the call quality. Is there a threshold percentage of users indicating good/bad that would lead to any change?
    - ClassyJacket 4y ago
      The Microsoft 365 admin panel still asks you how likely you are to recommend it to a friend or colleague. "Hey Steve, I recommend the Microsoft 365 admin panel. Of all the one admin panels for 365, it's definitely the best!"
      - cafeinux 4y ago
        What I love about the O365 admin panel, is that it lets me administrate O365.
    - azalemeth 4y ago
      I've been giving it one star consistently since it was introduced. It's still shit. I'd love to know what happens to that feedback. I once had a teams bug wherein I couldn't join a call whenever Google Chrome updated as it would fail the version number check and give me an error telling me I needed to use Google Chrome. I took a screenshot of this patent insanity and sent it to Microsoft support. A bit of discussion later and the response was something like "we know that Teams is continually evolving software and is not perfect at this time".
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Normally the upload is in the background but here clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it, which in turn meant it had to wait for the last instance to quit (after it was dumped). So the lesson here I think isn't that there should never be synchronous waiting for crash dump uploads the problem as I see it is 1) The fact that a process that important could crash. 2) That the upload was synchronous AND silent. Pick one. Just show me a tray message saying "Process blah crashed and we are uploading the crash dump click here to configure your preferences for automatic crash dump uploads".
  - alt227 4y ago
    > clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it This is not a case of it being important enough, this is the case for every single application: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=7413 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=74...
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      I mean that RuntimeBroker.exe was considered so important that the UI process (Explorer.exe?) couldn't proceed to show the start menu while it wasn't running, and instead had to wait for it to run. That RuntimeBroker couldn't restart until the last instance was dumped is what's true for all processes. But that doesn't explain why the UI block waiting for it and not show the start menu. RuntimeBroker may be required to show the complete/correct start menu because it relates to app permissions for store apps and similar, but Microsoft (again) likely overestimated the importance of their app store.
esalman 4y ago
Can confirm that start menu random lag happens on Windows 11 too. I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I sometimes encounter a slightly different situation: when I type something in the start menu, it finds it quickly. But then, when I press enter, nothing happens. There's the "select" animation, but the menu stays on-screen, and the app doesn't start. I will then proceed to press enter multiple times in frustration, each producing just the animation and no other discernible effect. Then, after a while, I'll get X times the app started all of a sudden. This also happens on the settings menu coming up when clicking on the network icon in the taskbar: if I click the gear to open the settings app, it will animate, but nothing else would happen. Click X times, and X settings apps pop up after a while. This is on a newish computer, 11th gen i7, fast-ish NVMe, etc. It was reinstalled when 11 22h2 came out. I also don't have much junk installed (nothing apart from intellij, teams and the rust build chain).
  - brucedawson 4y ago
    This sounds like exactly my symptoms. Check for crashes.
bitwize 4y ago
Meanwhile, an Amiga with a half meg of RAM and a 7 to 25 MHz processor never fails to respond instantly to user input unless it's totally hosed. We seem to have forgotten this very fundamental principle: the user's desires, expressed through input, are paramount for a desktop OS, which means that the OS must be designed from the ground up to respond to input at a very high priority. Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not have this critical bit of forethought. Haiku probably does, and I think macOS might, especially on Apple Silicon.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not > I think macOS might macOS is Unix. Specifically, it's a derivative of BSD.
  - pjscott 4y ago
    MacOS has a system for adjusting process priority based on what the user is doing. Whatever program is in the foreground is high-priority, and any programs that it calls with blocking mach-port-based IPC are temporarily promoted to the same priority. This helps quite a bit with responsiveness!
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  I really wish BeOS has taken off. Personal computing has taken a real hit over the years.
- daguava 4y ago
  Terrible comparison, Windows is still catching every one of those inputs and handling them. The diff is the amiga is doing maybe three things total. This isn't even apples to oranges, it's apples to radish farm.
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    doesn't seem all that different to me, the user. how many things am i doing at once, really?
msla 4y ago
I've long thought that Windows NT might make a pretty good OS if it weren't married to the Microsoft Windows interface. I know I'm abusing the terminology here, but only because the concept of a replaceable graphical shell is utterly foreign to an OS which began as one of many replaceable graphical shells for MS-DOS.
- mscdex 4y ago
  There are still some alternative shells that exist, even for Windows 10 and 11, including xoblite (inspired by blackbox I believe) [1] and Cairo Shell [2]. [1] https://xoblite.net/docs/ https://xoblite.net/docs/ [2] https://cairoshell.com/ https://cairoshell.com/
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    Oof, I must still have my xoblite config from 2006-2007 somewhere on a hard drive backup, thanks for the nostalgia
- spijdar 4y ago
  Strictly speaking, I don't think there's any technological reason why you couldn't replace the shell, although practically I'd bet the boot chain will refuse to load e.g. a replacement compositor that's not signed by Microsoft, not to mention the lack of API documentation at that level. I mention it since sometimes I daydream about trying to force a newer Windows runtime/kernel to load an older shell... Still, in a manner of speaking, this is encouraged for the Server SKUs, which IIRC Microsoft is trying to push the "GUI-less" version which you do all configuration on remotely with powershell and DCOM and the other half dozen RPC interfaces in Windows. It's not a replacement shell, but it is an example of running WinNT with the UI front-end hacked off.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - snazz 4y ago
    Getting rid of Explorer and using a different shell is much easier than you're thinking, just hold control+shift and right-click the taskbar, then close Explorer. However, you're still running dwm.exe at that point, which gives you window management, alt+tab, and access to Task Manager. Replacing that part of Windows would be harder.
martin_ky 4y ago
It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some http request. I noticed that often the online version of these apps (namely Outlook) are more responsive than the desktop counterparts. Edit: My experience with Excel - https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20 https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20
- rightbyte 4y ago
  I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    The new calc app has always been a travesty. Taking at least a full second or more to load, with an obnoxiously large interface. The original calculator opened instantly and had a completely functional ui. I get angry every time I need to launch calculator on a machine I have not configured with SpeedCrunch. Almost better to use Excel.
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      It's also worse for mixed keyboard and mouse operation [1], because some of the buttons (2nd, the trigonometry, functions and history submenus) now retain input focus after clicking on them, so pressing Enter operates that button again instead of completing your calculation. [1] If you can't remember the shortcuts for some of the more obscure functions – never mind that they're also badly documented and you have to find the list of shortcuts by searching for them yourself on the web. I have a memory that way back – possibly not even in Windows 7, but only XP – the calculator included an offline help with all the keyboard shortcuts listed. Nowadays the Windows 10 calculator doesn't include any sort of help at all, not even a link to the online help.
com2kid 4y ago
Across 2 different machines, 100% repo, the start button on my keyboard only opens the start menu every other time I push it. It has been that way for 4+ years, it went away for a bit after an update, then came back again. Microsoft never has recovered from their dismantling of their test organizations.
- rootw0rm 4y ago
  works every time for me...
- dimgl 4y ago
  Do you have a gaming keyboard? Weird keyboard glitches on Windows were happening to me due to switches on the keyboard, but from a UX perspective it always seemed like Windows was the issue.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    I also figured this was related to the keyboard. I sometimes use Windows at work, where I have a wireless MS (heh) keyboard. I swear it basically always misses the first key I press if I haven't typed in a while. Sure, it could be the keyboard going to sleep to save power or whatever. But that same keyboard never had any kind of issue on my other computers, including under Windows, nor on that very same computer running Linux.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Replugging after booting into Windows solved it for one such model.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    Well it repos on my laptop, so no. :-D I have seen it across multiple machines, different keyboards, different video cards. Super annoying, but at least it is consistent so I can get used to it...
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  I also have this issue. It's not 100% repo for me, be it's pretty frequent. I'm on a relatively recently fresh installed Windows 11. I've also have an issue where sometimes the start menu doesn't let me type in the search on the first open until I close and reopen again.
razemio 4y ago
Swichting to custom launchers (ueli or Flow Launcher for e.g.) has worked wonders for me. That being said, it was really fun to read the article. The amount of work and knowledge that went into this has to be immense. Thanks for sharing!
EdwardDiego 4y ago
And if it's randomascii hitting these issues and still not able to resolve them, holy hell, you're not going to get a bigger power user big analysis than this, MS, step to it!
- danuker 4y ago
  They just fired 5% of their workforce. The times got tougher (maybe due to interest rates). I wouldn't hold my breath.
delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate. If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true) It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
    The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it? Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
    - LelouBil 4y ago
      I am 100% sure it will happen someday.
      - ptx 4y ago
        It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
        delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
idiocrat 4y ago
While the ETW is helpful with a deep dive into problem analysis, a look into the Event Viewer can give some initial hint about crashing processes and other system/app faults. Sometimes I page through the Event Viewer entries, trying to find something interesting what went wrong in the last weeks/months.
llanowarelves 4y ago
Windows Start Menu has been broken for me sometimes (typing does nothing, have to re-click the menu to toggle it a few times and then it works), over the last few months. Last few weeks has been ok. And recently completely-finished browser downloads have to wait extra long (beyond when the browser says it's done) plus an F5 in Explorer, for Windows to not complain about a "missing file at path" when trying to use the completely-downloaded file. This could be an interaction with a virus-scanner (ESET) putting the file in quarantine or whatever real quick before putting it back out but nothing has changed on my end in the last ~4 years. I appreciate that the author here is actually profiling stuff.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  ESET is rubbish. Had to do the obligatory support round for family over the holidays. One machine would sporadically not finish sending and email via Outlook, and even rebooting doesn't fix that issue. You just had to wait about a day and it would be ok again. You couldn't send any mail during that time. I tracked it down to the Outlook plugin of ESET. I saw it also has other features like a browser plugin, and intercept for TLS encrypted traffic. These kinds of security products always make your system less secure, not more. All those complex components that hook into every part of your system are buggy and contain vulnerabilities that malware can target. Use Windows Defender and nothing more.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Thanks for your response. I liked it because its lower resource usage than Defender, and mostly stayed out of the way. I'll have to take stock of Defender and see how it is again.
tryfinally 4y ago
It sounds like a good idea to preemptively disable Windows Error Reporting. I usually do it (and kill all other telemetry I can find) on all Windows machines I set up. Microsoft’s going to need to try harder than this to convince me to keep it enabled.
zwaps 4y ago
I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search, and pressing enter opens Safari. Relevant results (folders + files) do appear, but usually you have to scroll. The search bar itself comes up very quickly though. If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this: Window management is utter garbage. Maximizing is actively discouraged. Tiling left / right etc? Doesn't exist. Everything must be random size and overlap weirdly. Instead, each new version brings a new quick switch or workspace functionality that I have never seen anyone use. Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times!
- infinitezest 4y ago
  For window management and tiling, I think Rectangle is better than most of the alternatives I've used. And its OSS https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
  - whatatita 4y ago
    I use this and love it! It's in my "must have" list of apps I install straight away. You can install it with brew too: `brew install --cask rectangle`
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  You can switch off everything related to siri in the system settings (especially 'siri suggestions' in the spotlight settings) to get a local spotlight search (which then actually works pretty well as app launcher, that's what I use it mainly for).
- 4y ago
yellow_lead 4y ago
There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search 1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?) 2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed 3) Partial searches don't work very well. At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app
- wvenable 4y ago
  I've installed OpenShell as a start menu replacement since Windows 8.
  - yellow_lead 4y ago
    Looks cool, will try it out.
- input_sh 4y ago
  > At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app Not using Windows for like a decade now, but I always go for a third-party launcher on Linux/macOS. They're fast(er) and more importantly extensible. Instead of trying to index everything all the time, they function via triggers. If I start my query with "em", it searches emojis, if I start it with "=" it does calculations, if with "tr" it translates stuff for me, if with "fs" it does a file search. If there's no trigger at the start it searches apps on my system, and if no app is found it points me to my search engine (and respects my default browser choice). Instead of using a default launcher that's trying to guess what I want and makes everything slow as hell, limiting the scope of my search like this just makes things much faster. There must be some launcher for Windows that's comparable to Alfred (macOS) or uLauncher (Linux) and once you try it, you'll never go back.
  - yellow_lead 4y ago
    I used Launchy before but got tired of it after a while. Maybe it's time to try it again.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
ntech 4y ago
I've switched to using PowerToys Run (in the Microsoft PowerToys apps family). It's good to have access to everything in one place (including open windows, settings, ..) and access them without touching the mouse, however the lag can sometimes get annoying. On the plus side it's open source and continuously improved.
boloust 4y ago
The worst thing about the Windows Start Menu search is that it changes the top result without any user input, and it feels like it happens almost every time I use Windows. I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want. But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a page of useless Bing results. Just infuriating, and makes me so glad that I'm using Rofi/Wofi, which never changes the results without user input, and responds to keypresses with no perceptible delay, even when searching across every file in my home directory (via fzf).
- happymellon 4y ago
  It has been said that some companies that need to show positive stats will do this slight delay, because all the misclicks show that they are popular. This is why they are top, because everyone uses this feature with an artificial delay! But that's surely just a conspiracy theory, no company would possibly manipulate their users because that's how you get promoted, or with stack ranking, not fired.
- nikau 4y ago
  There is a registry key that turns off web search in win10, it makes it much nicer.
  - adzm 4y ago
    For posterity, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD Set its value to 1. Should work for Windows 11 and 10
    - paulcapewell 4y ago
      I don't see an Explorer folder under that path on my installation.
      - avx56 4y ago
gigel82 4y ago
On Windows 11 the start menu is simply unusable; there is no way at all to disable network requests (group policy, registry, etc.). Every single keystroke makes a new network requests, even with web search disabled. I just bought Start11.
Neil44 4y ago
From an IT support & admin point of view The Windows 10+ XML based start menu stuff has been bit of a dumpster fire the whole time. Start menus would randomly not work at all and need the users whole profile nuking to resolve. Who wants to see results from Bing in their start menu? Anyone? Controling start menu and taskbar for the org by policy is way more complicated now. Yes you can make it work eventually but it could be so much easier if anyone at Microsoft gave a crap about users and admins any more.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.
- fassssst 4y ago
  Pretty much every engineer on the Windows team does this type of work. When you have 1+ billion computers with an infinite combination of peripherals and environments (what language, what apps are running, etc.), it becomes a game of statistics and prioritization.
  - brucedawson 4y ago
    I don't think that is true. If they had that many developers burning down performance issues then bugs like this would (IMHO) be getting fixed earlier. Anecdotally it sounds like a lot of customers are hitting this bug and I'd love to know whether it is known, being investigated, or just noticed now. I'm sure it has been showing up in their start-menu telemetry. I also wonder why they haven't fixed this issue: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/1607163439159611392t https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/160716343915961139... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-soft... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-zeroing-through-parallelism/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-z...
- fexecve 4y ago
  The Windows team probably has laptops with high-speed SSDs, and tons of RAM, a fast CPU, and a fast internet connection. So now already with that, 13 seconds is probably down to 3 seconds, and they are probably also okay with (sometimes) waiting 3 seconds while the search box opens after pressing the windows key.
Helmut10001 4y ago
I _really_ recommend Keypirinha [1] for any sane use of Windows. This little tool has rocketed my productivity (I also prefer it above Microsoft PowerToys Run). [1]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/
- M1ch431 4y ago
  Its integration with Everything is also very good (arguably the fastest search tool on Windows to my knowledge). https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ Honestly, I find the less software/features I use written by Microsoft the better for productivity on Windows. Windows has become shockingly slow and buggy since Windows 7 even though I keep upgrading my hardware.
etatoby 4y ago
> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution REALLY Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Wrong vibe, friend!
xeonax 4y ago
I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.
- spapas82 4y ago
  This. First thing I do on a new windows installation is to install everything. I never use the start menu, windows search or whatever anymore. When I need to run a program that isn't on my desktop or on my quick run taskbar I press ctrl+alt+s and then a few characters of the name. Pick the result I want with the arrow keys and press enter. Done.
  - xeonax 4y ago
    Before Everything I used to remember my filesystem. Like wheres what to rapidly access stuff. This was 12-14 years ago. I now just remember the file name. Everything remembers everything else.
  - eviks 4y ago
    with an app launcher you wouldn't need to touch the arrow keys as the apps would get a) sorted by frecency and b) have a more convenient shortcut
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stuaxo 4y ago
I use Win-Key and type stuff to launch programs in GNOME and it works very well, doing this in Windows hasn't worked well in the time I can remember using it - at best the search is slow, but a lot of the time it just doesn't find the thing I want - it feels janky.
eviks 4y ago
> I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues (like having to move your focus off screen center) with this neglected core OS functionality. While you're at it, you could also rebind it to something more ergonomic like CapsLock tap (but not hold)
- distcs 4y ago
  > That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues Sorry, no! I am not going to install a whole new application only to launch programs - the most fundamental operation that an OS should be able to do on its own. If the OS cannot launch programs using the Win key, it needs to be analyzed and fixed. The OP article does half of that very well!
  - eviks 4y ago
    Don't get it, if it's the most fundamental operation, supposedly you want to be able to do that in the most excellent way, no? Waiting years for the OS fix doesn't help you in the interim
    - stuaxo 4y ago
      When I use GNOME on Linux, I can launch my apps like this very quickly, boot back into Windows occasionally and it's a disaster. I'm going to try some of the recommendations, but can't believe the start menu of all things can be broken this badly.
- jpeter 4y ago
  Hitting the <Win> key works better than the app launchers I have tried.
roomey 4y ago
Sorry to be that guy, but this is why XFCE is so good! Them random delays when doing simple things in windows is so frustrating. A desktop should get out of your way, and be so quick you don't notice it. Window switches, minimizing, maximising, launching, closing etc. Or my personal favourite, type and the letters take their time to appear. Only after you have worked with a system that never ever lags on these everyday actions do you see how frustrating it is to work every day with these laggy things. I saw some Mac users comment on the lack of lag on their laptops! I'm sure they can identify with how nice it is.
- gcbirzan 4y ago
  I honestly don't know what they're talking about, I had a mac until recently and very often I'd get up to 500ms delay in writing in a Chrome text box.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Anything more than roughly 10ms from the key being depressed to the display updating is not normal on a Mac. If you’re seeing 500ms that’s either something specific to Chrome (the timing is slow enough I’d believe a network call for something like spell checking or suggestions) or some kind of extension interfering with the normal system behavior. I’ve heard about that with some security software so it can be useful to report those as bugs.
    - gcbirzan 4y ago
      It's not specific to chrome, it's just worse in chrome. Iterm doesn't have this problem, but pretty much everything else I use does: intellij, slack, chrome, Firefox. We use crowdstrike, but even before that I had this problem. My mac is just painfully slow, if I start docker it becomes almost unusable. This is a 2019 Intel one, btw, it might not be so bad on m1s, but when I got the job (and the mac) , only the original one external monitor m1s were available.
      - acdha 4y ago
foobarbecue 4y ago
Why the hell does windows think it's ok to secretly phone home with crash reports by default, especially when sending those makes the problem worse by slowing down the crash recovery? In this case the problem would probably have been insignificant if not for super slow, blocking, error telemetry. At least store these and send them later, sheesh.
- fexecve 4y ago
  Woah woah woah, who said this is "secret"? Were you expecting a big red skull and crossbones to take over your screen whenever a phone home occurs?
- brucedawson 4y ago
  They only send crash reports if you opt-in to the customer experience improvement program (or whatever it's called), I believe. In general I think that sending crash dumps is _great_. Sending crash dumps is the number one reason why software is more reliable now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. But, synchronously sending a crash dump together with not telling the user that you are synchronously sending a crash dump - that is problematic. But, I can see how they got to this state. But, if they are going to upload crash dumps they need to promptly address the crashes and I'd love to know why that did not happen.
TiredOfLife 4y ago
And another case of a good Bruce Dawson article spoiled by completely useless and irrelevant hackernews comments.
- fexecve 4y ago
  What? The comments here are very on-topic as far as I can tell.
72deluxe 4y ago
I just use Everything by voidtools and assign a taskbar icon to it so it can be launched windows + 3. Other applications I often use are in the taskbar so windows + <number> (0-9) work for opening them. Beats using the Start Menu.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
I’m so glad I switched away from windows.
dwringer 4y ago
I've always kind of wondered if this is working as intended. Occasionally I type the name of an installed program, but the result loads slowly for whatever reason, but in the meantime there's almost instantly a search link which, if I press <Enter> thinking my result was found, opens up Edge (a browser I never launch otherwise) and inevitably shows me a variety of advertisements, rather than launching the program I already have on my computer. This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.
PaulHoule 4y ago
For me it is a pet peeve that the start menu regularly takes a vacation. It's particularly bad when the machine is starting, it seems the machine would rather listen to the music in its head than take commands from me. I wish it would put a priority on getting the start menu up and running even if it meant caching the state of it ahead of time so it can resume quickly -- I mean, there are just a few commands that I type in 90%+ of the time if it had those ready to go and took another second or to look up something obscure I could forgive it.
- pxc 4y ago
  > It's particularly bad when the machine is starting For me, this can be several minutes after boot. Windows takes forever to actually finish starting up on my work computer, presumably in part because many persistent background apps, even ones that run with elevated permissions, are GUI apps that don't start until the user session.
howeyc 4y ago
This is exactly why I use OSS whenever possible. Once you've gone through all the trouble of the post, you can spend a little more time to submit a patch.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
flacebo 4y ago
I stopped using windows search a while ago. It is unreasonably slow. Everything (the app) indexes every file on all of your drives in seconds, then filters the list instantly as you type. When I start typing an application name that has a shortcut in the start menu, it shouldn't take seconds to find, period. There is no excuse. I'm shocked how bad windows search is every time I have to use it on another machine. After trying multiple application launchers, I've settled with UELI. It does a lot of things (much more than windows search), instantly.
Phlogistique 4y ago
Is there a tool for Linux that can do something similar? i.e. give you somewhere to start to debug random UI hangs?
- fexecve 4y ago
  Source availability.
rcdwealth 4y ago
[dead]
anonymousiam 4y ago
It looks like Windows phones home every time you hit the start button, and when web search crashes, it arbitrarily waits for the crash dump to be reported to the mother ship before launching again. The most useful information is at the bottom of the comments: "I had some of the same issues – just with start menu being too slow. I disabled web search for start menu, and it works, is fast, only finds apps (and other local stuff; documents, folder, settings – but only when you navigate to that specified search target). Bottomline – turning off web search in start menu = speed regedit/use at own discretion: HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer “DisableSearchBoxSuggestions”=dword:00000001"
kwhitefoot 4y ago
Reading the comments here makes me wonder why any of you use MS Windows. Is there something that all of you must have that only runs on Windows?
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  I can't get my gf to use a Mac (she does it if she has to). It's just familiarity, there's no other reason. Macs have a million arbitrary and pointless differences to Windows due to their long history that are grains of sand in the eyes of someone who doesn't care about computers, they just get in the way and frustrate people. I use Macs though and much prefer it. Apple still has a relatively disciplined and competent engineering org. Everything in Windows is kinda broken/unreliable and it seems to be getting worse over time. Their insistence on using C++ for everything even in 2023 is killing them - bugs like heap corruption in search services shouldn't be happening but stuff like that is everywhere. Windows 10 is indeed abandonware like the article asks, they only really improve 11 now.
- brucedawson 4y ago
  Switching is a huge hassle, with uncertainty about whether things will actually be better or not, or if I will just hit different problems. Windows is actually excellent in many ways (see the tools I used to analyze this) so I would definitely be missing some things. So, momentum plus uncertainty about whether other environments are actually better or just different. Plus my job.
sizzle 4y ago
The lagging inputs in Windows reminds me of the concept of a “Windows Minute” Definition: A reference to time where the culculated period bears no connection to the reality of that time span. Used to understate the significance of accurate measurement. Origin: Microsoft Windows' inability to convey an accurate file download, or transfer, time. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20minute https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20mi... The lag in Windows is what made me switch to Mac, Using Finder and Spotlight and managing applications in the Applications folder made me never want to experience Windows again.

427 points by jabagawee 4y ago

It probably hasn't been addressed because user experience is depressingly low priority for microsoft... And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.

martin_ky 4y ago
I'd say the reality is even more ironic - they collect so much data and reports, pretending this is to help to improve the user experience, but in the end it makes the experience so much worse.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  It still irks me to no end when a Microsoft product asks me to rate my experience. Teams is constantly badgering me to rate the call quality. Is there a threshold percentage of users indicating good/bad that would lead to any change?
  - ClassyJacket 4y ago
    The Microsoft 365 admin panel still asks you how likely you are to recommend it to a friend or colleague. "Hey Steve, I recommend the Microsoft 365 admin panel. Of all the one admin panels for 365, it's definitely the best!"
    - cafeinux 4y ago
      What I love about the O365 admin panel, is that it lets me administrate O365.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    I've been giving it one star consistently since it was introduced. It's still shit. I'd love to know what happens to that feedback. I once had a teams bug wherein I couldn't join a call whenever Google Chrome updated as it would fail the version number check and give me an error telling me I needed to use Google Chrome. I took a screenshot of this patent insanity and sent it to Microsoft support. A bit of discussion later and the response was something like "we know that Teams is continually evolving software and is not perfect at this time".
alkonaut 4y ago
Normally the upload is in the background but here clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it, which in turn meant it had to wait for the last instance to quit (after it was dumped). So the lesson here I think isn't that there should never be synchronous waiting for crash dump uploads the problem as I see it is 1) The fact that a process that important could crash. 2) That the upload was synchronous AND silent. Pick one. Just show me a tray message saying "Process blah crashed and we are uploading the crash dump click here to configure your preferences for automatic crash dump uploads".
- alt227 4y ago
  > clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it This is not a case of it being important enough, this is the case for every single application: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=7413 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=74...
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I mean that RuntimeBroker.exe was considered so important that the UI process (Explorer.exe?) couldn't proceed to show the start menu while it wasn't running, and instead had to wait for it to run. That RuntimeBroker couldn't restart until the last instance was dumped is what's true for all processes. But that doesn't explain why the UI block waiting for it and not show the start menu. RuntimeBroker may be required to show the complete/correct start menu because it relates to app permissions for store apps and similar, but Microsoft (again) likely overestimated the importance of their app store.

esalman 4y ago

Can confirm that start menu random lag happens on Windows 11 too. I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
I sometimes encounter a slightly different situation: when I type something in the start menu, it finds it quickly. But then, when I press enter, nothing happens. There's the "select" animation, but the menu stays on-screen, and the app doesn't start. I will then proceed to press enter multiple times in frustration, each producing just the animation and no other discernible effect. Then, after a while, I'll get X times the app started all of a sudden. This also happens on the settings menu coming up when clicking on the network icon in the taskbar: if I click the gear to open the settings app, it will animate, but nothing else would happen. Click X times, and X settings apps pop up after a while. This is on a newish computer, 11th gen i7, fast-ish NVMe, etc. It was reinstalled when 11 22h2 came out. I also don't have much junk installed (nothing apart from intellij, teams and the rust build chain).
- brucedawson 4y ago
  This sounds like exactly my symptoms. Check for crashes.

bitwize 4y ago

Meanwhile, an Amiga with a half meg of RAM and a 7 to 25 MHz processor never fails to respond instantly to user input unless it's totally hosed. We seem to have forgotten this very fundamental principle: the user's desires, expressed through input, are paramount for a desktop OS, which means that the OS must be designed from the ground up to respond to input at a very high priority. Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not have this critical bit of forethought. Haiku probably does, and I think macOS might, especially on Apple Silicon.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not > I think macOS might macOS is Unix. Specifically, it's a derivative of BSD.
- pjscott 4y ago
  MacOS has a system for adjusting process priority based on what the user is doing. Whatever program is in the foreground is high-priority, and any programs that it calls with blocking mach-port-based IPC are temporarily promoted to the same priority. This helps quite a bit with responsiveness!
Baeocystin 4y ago
I really wish BeOS has taken off. Personal computing has taken a real hit over the years.
daguava 4y ago
Terrible comparison, Windows is still catching every one of those inputs and handling them. The diff is the amiga is doing maybe three things total. This isn't even apples to oranges, it's apples to radish farm.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  doesn't seem all that different to me, the user. how many things am i doing at once, really?

msla 4y ago

I've long thought that Windows NT might make a pretty good OS if it weren't married to the Microsoft Windows interface. I know I'm abusing the terminology here, but only because the concept of a replaceable graphical shell is utterly foreign to an OS which began as one of many replaceable graphical shells for MS-DOS.

mscdex 4y ago
There are still some alternative shells that exist, even for Windows 10 and 11, including xoblite (inspired by blackbox I believe) [1] and Cairo Shell [2]. [1] https://xoblite.net/docs/ https://xoblite.net/docs/ [2] https://cairoshell.com/ https://cairoshell.com/
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Oof, I must still have my xoblite config from 2006-2007 somewhere on a hard drive backup, thanks for the nostalgia
spijdar 4y ago
Strictly speaking, I don't think there's any technological reason why you couldn't replace the shell, although practically I'd bet the boot chain will refuse to load e.g. a replacement compositor that's not signed by Microsoft, not to mention the lack of API documentation at that level. I mention it since sometimes I daydream about trying to force a newer Windows runtime/kernel to load an older shell... Still, in a manner of speaking, this is encouraged for the Server SKUs, which IIRC Microsoft is trying to push the "GUI-less" version which you do all configuration on remotely with powershell and DCOM and the other half dozen RPC interfaces in Windows. It's not a replacement shell, but it is an example of running WinNT with the UI front-end hacked off.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snazz 4y ago
  Getting rid of Explorer and using a different shell is much easier than you're thinking, just hold control+shift and right-click the taskbar, then close Explorer. However, you're still running dwm.exe at that point, which gives you window management, alt+tab, and access to Task Manager. Replacing that part of Windows would be harder.

martin_ky 4y ago

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some http request. I noticed that often the online version of these apps (namely Outlook) are more responsive than the desktop counterparts. Edit: My experience with Excel - https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20 https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20

rightbyte 4y ago
I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  The new calc app has always been a travesty. Taking at least a full second or more to load, with an obnoxiously large interface. The original calculator opened instantly and had a completely functional ui. I get angry every time I need to launch calculator on a machine I have not configured with SpeedCrunch. Almost better to use Excel.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    It's also worse for mixed keyboard and mouse operation [1], because some of the buttons (2nd, the trigonometry, functions and history submenus) now retain input focus after clicking on them, so pressing Enter operates that button again instead of completing your calculation. [1] If you can't remember the shortcuts for some of the more obscure functions – never mind that they're also badly documented and you have to find the list of shortcuts by searching for them yourself on the web. I have a memory that way back – possibly not even in Windows 7, but only XP – the calculator included an offline help with all the keyboard shortcuts listed. Nowadays the Windows 10 calculator doesn't include any sort of help at all, not even a link to the online help.

com2kid 4y ago

Across 2 different machines, 100% repo, the start button on my keyboard only opens the start menu every other time I push it. It has been that way for 4+ years, it went away for a bit after an update, then came back again. Microsoft never has recovered from their dismantling of their test organizations.

rootw0rm 4y ago
works every time for me...
dimgl 4y ago
Do you have a gaming keyboard? Weird keyboard glitches on Windows were happening to me due to switches on the keyboard, but from a UX perspective it always seemed like Windows was the issue.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I also figured this was related to the keyboard. I sometimes use Windows at work, where I have a wireless MS (heh) keyboard. I swear it basically always misses the first key I press if I haven't typed in a while. Sure, it could be the keyboard going to sleep to save power or whatever. But that same keyboard never had any kind of issue on my other computers, including under Windows, nor on that very same computer running Linux.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Replugging after booting into Windows solved it for one such model.
- com2kid 4y ago
  Well it repos on my laptop, so no. :-D I have seen it across multiple machines, different keyboards, different video cards. Super annoying, but at least it is consistent so I can get used to it...
xboxnolifes 4y ago
I also have this issue. It's not 100% repo for me, be it's pretty frequent. I'm on a relatively recently fresh installed Windows 11. I've also have an issue where sometimes the start menu doesn't let me type in the search on the first open until I close and reopen again.

razemio 4y ago

Swichting to custom launchers (ueli or Flow Launcher for e.g.) has worked wonders for me. That being said, it was really fun to read the article. The amount of work and knowledge that went into this has to be immense. Thanks for sharing!

EdwardDiego 4y ago

And if it's randomascii hitting these issues and still not able to resolve them, holy hell, you're not going to get a bigger power user big analysis than this, MS, step to it!

danuker 4y ago
They just fired 5% of their workforce. The times got tougher (maybe due to interest rates). I wouldn't hold my breath.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate. If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.

viraptor 4y ago
> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true) It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it? Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
  - LelouBil 4y ago
    I am 100% sure it will happen someday.
    - ptx 4y ago
      It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
      - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

idiocrat 4y ago

While the ETW is helpful with a deep dive into problem analysis, a look into the Event Viewer can give some initial hint about crashing processes and other system/app faults. Sometimes I page through the Event Viewer entries, trying to find something interesting what went wrong in the last weeks/months.

llanowarelves 4y ago

Windows Start Menu has been broken for me sometimes (typing does nothing, have to re-click the menu to toggle it a few times and then it works), over the last few months. Last few weeks has been ok. And recently completely-finished browser downloads have to wait extra long (beyond when the browser says it's done) plus an F5 in Explorer, for Windows to not complain about a "missing file at path" when trying to use the completely-downloaded file. This could be an interaction with a virus-scanner (ESET) putting the file in quarantine or whatever real quick before putting it back out but nothing has changed on my end in the last ~4 years. I appreciate that the author here is actually profiling stuff.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
ESET is rubbish. Had to do the obligatory support round for family over the holidays. One machine would sporadically not finish sending and email via Outlook, and even rebooting doesn't fix that issue. You just had to wait about a day and it would be ok again. You couldn't send any mail during that time. I tracked it down to the Outlook plugin of ESET. I saw it also has other features like a browser plugin, and intercept for TLS encrypted traffic. These kinds of security products always make your system less secure, not more. All those complex components that hook into every part of your system are buggy and contain vulnerabilities that malware can target. Use Windows Defender and nothing more.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Thanks for your response. I liked it because its lower resource usage than Defender, and mostly stayed out of the way. I'll have to take stock of Defender and see how it is again.

tryfinally 4y ago

It sounds like a good idea to preemptively disable Windows Error Reporting. I usually do it (and kill all other telemetry I can find) on all Windows machines I set up. Microsoft’s going to need to try harder than this to convince me to keep it enabled.

zwaps 4y ago

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search, and pressing enter opens Safari. Relevant results (folders + files) do appear, but usually you have to scroll. The search bar itself comes up very quickly though. If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this: Window management is utter garbage. Maximizing is actively discouraged. Tiling left / right etc? Doesn't exist. Everything must be random size and overlap weirdly. Instead, each new version brings a new quick switch or workspace functionality that I have never seen anyone use. Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times!

infinitezest 4y ago
For window management and tiling, I think Rectangle is better than most of the alternatives I've used. And its OSS https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
- whatatita 4y ago
  I use this and love it! It's in my "must have" list of apps I install straight away. You can install it with brew too: `brew install --cask rectangle`
flohofwoe 4y ago
You can switch off everything related to siri in the system settings (especially 'siri suggestions' in the spotlight settings) to get a local spotlight search (which then actually works pretty well as app launcher, that's what I use it mainly for).
4y ago

yellow_lead 4y ago

There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search 1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?) 2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed 3) Partial searches don't work very well. At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app

wvenable 4y ago
I've installed OpenShell as a start menu replacement since Windows 8.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Looks cool, will try it out.
input_sh 4y ago
> At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app Not using Windows for like a decade now, but I always go for a third-party launcher on Linux/macOS. They're fast(er) and more importantly extensible. Instead of trying to index everything all the time, they function via triggers. If I start my query with "em", it searches emojis, if I start it with "=" it does calculations, if with "tr" it translates stuff for me, if with "fs" it does a file search. If there's no trigger at the start it searches apps on my system, and if no app is found it points me to my search engine (and respects my default browser choice). Instead of using a default launcher that's trying to guess what I want and makes everything slow as hell, limiting the scope of my search like this just makes things much faster. There must be some launcher for Windows that's comparable to Alfred (macOS) or uLauncher (Linux) and once you try it, you'll never go back.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  I used Launchy before but got tired of it after a while. Maybe it's time to try it again.
- cassepipe 4y ago

ntech 4y ago

I've switched to using PowerToys Run (in the Microsoft PowerToys apps family). It's good to have access to everything in one place (including open windows, settings, ..) and access them without touching the mouse, however the lag can sometimes get annoying. On the plus side it's open source and continuously improved.

boloust 4y ago

The worst thing about the Windows Start Menu search is that it changes the top result without any user input, and it feels like it happens almost every time I use Windows. I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want. But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a page of useless Bing results. Just infuriating, and makes me so glad that I'm using Rofi/Wofi, which never changes the results without user input, and responds to keypresses with no perceptible delay, even when searching across every file in my home directory (via fzf).

happymellon 4y ago
It has been said that some companies that need to show positive stats will do this slight delay, because all the misclicks show that they are popular. This is why they are top, because everyone uses this feature with an artificial delay! But that's surely just a conspiracy theory, no company would possibly manipulate their users because that's how you get promoted, or with stack ranking, not fired.
nikau 4y ago
There is a registry key that turns off web search in win10, it makes it much nicer.
- adzm 4y ago
  For posterity, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD Set its value to 1. Should work for Windows 11 and 10
  - paulcapewell 4y ago
    I don't see an Explorer folder under that path on my installation.
    - avx56 4y ago

gigel82 4y ago

On Windows 11 the start menu is simply unusable; there is no way at all to disable network requests (group policy, registry, etc.). Every single keystroke makes a new network requests, even with web search disabled. I just bought Start11.

Neil44 4y ago

From an IT support & admin point of view The Windows 10+ XML based start menu stuff has been bit of a dumpster fire the whole time. Start menus would randomly not work at all and need the users whole profile nuking to resolve. Who wants to see results from Bing in their start menu? Anyone? Controling start menu and taskbar for the org by policy is way more complicated now. Yes you can make it work eventually but it could be so much easier if anyone at Microsoft gave a crap about users and admins any more.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.

fassssst 4y ago
Pretty much every engineer on the Windows team does this type of work. When you have 1+ billion computers with an infinite combination of peripherals and environments (what language, what apps are running, etc.), it becomes a game of statistics and prioritization.
- brucedawson 4y ago
  I don't think that is true. If they had that many developers burning down performance issues then bugs like this would (IMHO) be getting fixed earlier. Anecdotally it sounds like a lot of customers are hitting this bug and I'd love to know whether it is known, being investigated, or just noticed now. I'm sure it has been showing up in their start-menu telemetry. I also wonder why they haven't fixed this issue: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/1607163439159611392t https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/160716343915961139... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-soft... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-zeroing-through-parallelism/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-z...
fexecve 4y ago
The Windows team probably has laptops with high-speed SSDs, and tons of RAM, a fast CPU, and a fast internet connection. So now already with that, 13 seconds is probably down to 3 seconds, and they are probably also okay with (sometimes) waiting 3 seconds while the search box opens after pressing the windows key.

Helmut10001 4y ago

I _really_ recommend Keypirinha [1] for any sane use of Windows. This little tool has rocketed my productivity (I also prefer it above Microsoft PowerToys Run). [1]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/

M1ch431 4y ago
Its integration with Everything is also very good (arguably the fastest search tool on Windows to my knowledge). https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ Honestly, I find the less software/features I use written by Microsoft the better for productivity on Windows. Windows has become shockingly slow and buggy since Windows 7 even though I keep upgrading my hardware.

etatoby 4y ago

> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution REALLY Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?

barbazoo 4y ago
Wrong vibe, friend!

xeonax 4y ago

I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.

spapas82 4y ago
This. First thing I do on a new windows installation is to install everything. I never use the start menu, windows search or whatever anymore. When I need to run a program that isn't on my desktop or on my quick run taskbar I press ctrl+alt+s and then a few characters of the name. Pick the result I want with the arrow keys and press enter. Done.
- xeonax 4y ago
  Before Everything I used to remember my filesystem. Like wheres what to rapidly access stuff. This was 12-14 years ago. I now just remember the file name. Everything remembers everything else.
- eviks 4y ago
  with an app launcher you wouldn't need to touch the arrow keys as the apps would get a) sorted by frecency and b) have a more convenient shortcut

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stuaxo 4y ago

I use Win-Key and type stuff to launch programs in GNOME and it works very well, doing this in Windows hasn't worked well in the time I can remember using it - at best the search is slow, but a lot of the time it just doesn't find the thing I want - it feels janky.

eviks 4y ago

> I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues (like having to move your focus off screen center) with this neglected core OS functionality. While you're at it, you could also rebind it to something more ergonomic like CapsLock tap (but not hold)

distcs 4y ago
> That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues Sorry, no! I am not going to install a whole new application only to launch programs - the most fundamental operation that an OS should be able to do on its own. If the OS cannot launch programs using the Win key, it needs to be analyzed and fixed. The OP article does half of that very well!
- eviks 4y ago
  Don't get it, if it's the most fundamental operation, supposedly you want to be able to do that in the most excellent way, no? Waiting years for the OS fix doesn't help you in the interim
  - stuaxo 4y ago
    When I use GNOME on Linux, I can launch my apps like this very quickly, boot back into Windows occasionally and it's a disaster. I'm going to try some of the recommendations, but can't believe the start menu of all things can be broken this badly.
jpeter 4y ago
Hitting the <Win> key works better than the app launchers I have tried.

roomey 4y ago

Sorry to be that guy, but this is why XFCE is so good! Them random delays when doing simple things in windows is so frustrating. A desktop should get out of your way, and be so quick you don't notice it. Window switches, minimizing, maximising, launching, closing etc. Or my personal favourite, type and the letters take their time to appear. Only after you have worked with a system that never ever lags on these everyday actions do you see how frustrating it is to work every day with these laggy things. I saw some Mac users comment on the lack of lag on their laptops! I'm sure they can identify with how nice it is.

gcbirzan 4y ago
I honestly don't know what they're talking about, I had a mac until recently and very often I'd get up to 500ms delay in writing in a Chrome text box.
- acdha 4y ago
  Anything more than roughly 10ms from the key being depressed to the display updating is not normal on a Mac. If you’re seeing 500ms that’s either something specific to Chrome (the timing is slow enough I’d believe a network call for something like spell checking or suggestions) or some kind of extension interfering with the normal system behavior. I’ve heard about that with some security software so it can be useful to report those as bugs.
  - gcbirzan 4y ago
    It's not specific to chrome, it's just worse in chrome. Iterm doesn't have this problem, but pretty much everything else I use does: intellij, slack, chrome, Firefox. We use crowdstrike, but even before that I had this problem. My mac is just painfully slow, if I start docker it becomes almost unusable. This is a 2019 Intel one, btw, it might not be so bad on m1s, but when I got the job (and the mac) , only the original one external monitor m1s were available.
    - acdha 4y ago

foobarbecue 4y ago

Why the hell does windows think it's ok to secretly phone home with crash reports by default, especially when sending those makes the problem worse by slowing down the crash recovery? In this case the problem would probably have been insignificant if not for super slow, blocking, error telemetry. At least store these and send them later, sheesh.

fexecve 4y ago
Woah woah woah, who said this is "secret"? Were you expecting a big red skull and crossbones to take over your screen whenever a phone home occurs?
brucedawson 4y ago
They only send crash reports if you opt-in to the customer experience improvement program (or whatever it's called), I believe. In general I think that sending crash dumps is _great_. Sending crash dumps is the number one reason why software is more reliable now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. But, synchronously sending a crash dump together with not telling the user that you are synchronously sending a crash dump - that is problematic. But, I can see how they got to this state. But, if they are going to upload crash dumps they need to promptly address the crashes and I'd love to know why that did not happen.

TiredOfLife 4y ago

And another case of a good Bruce Dawson article spoiled by completely useless and irrelevant hackernews comments.

fexecve 4y ago
What? The comments here are very on-topic as far as I can tell.

72deluxe 4y ago

I just use Everything by voidtools and assign a taskbar icon to it so it can be launched windows + 3. Other applications I often use are in the taskbar so windows + <number> (0-9) work for opening them. Beats using the Start Menu.

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MagicMoonlight 4y ago

I’m so glad I switched away from windows.

dwringer 4y ago

I've always kind of wondered if this is working as intended. Occasionally I type the name of an installed program, but the result loads slowly for whatever reason, but in the meantime there's almost instantly a search link which, if I press <Enter> thinking my result was found, opens up Edge (a browser I never launch otherwise) and inevitably shows me a variety of advertisements, rather than launching the program I already have on my computer. This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.

PaulHoule 4y ago

For me it is a pet peeve that the start menu regularly takes a vacation. It's particularly bad when the machine is starting, it seems the machine would rather listen to the music in its head than take commands from me. I wish it would put a priority on getting the start menu up and running even if it meant caching the state of it ahead of time so it can resume quickly -- I mean, there are just a few commands that I type in 90%+ of the time if it had those ready to go and took another second or to look up something obscure I could forgive it.

pxc 4y ago
> It's particularly bad when the machine is starting For me, this can be several minutes after boot. Windows takes forever to actually finish starting up on my work computer, presumably in part because many persistent background apps, even ones that run with elevated permissions, are GUI apps that don't start until the user session.

howeyc 4y ago

This is exactly why I use OSS whenever possible. Once you've gone through all the trouble of the post, you can spend a little more time to submit a patch.

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flacebo 4y ago

I stopped using windows search a while ago. It is unreasonably slow. Everything (the app) indexes every file on all of your drives in seconds, then filters the list instantly as you type. When I start typing an application name that has a shortcut in the start menu, it shouldn't take seconds to find, period. There is no excuse. I'm shocked how bad windows search is every time I have to use it on another machine. After trying multiple application launchers, I've settled with UELI. It does a lot of things (much more than windows search), instantly.

Phlogistique 4y ago

Is there a tool for Linux that can do something similar? i.e. give you somewhere to start to debug random UI hangs?

fexecve 4y ago
Source availability.

rcdwealth 4y ago

[dead]

anonymousiam 4y ago

It looks like Windows phones home every time you hit the start button, and when web search crashes, it arbitrarily waits for the crash dump to be reported to the mother ship before launching again. The most useful information is at the bottom of the comments: "I had some of the same issues – just with start menu being too slow. I disabled web search for start menu, and it works, is fast, only finds apps (and other local stuff; documents, folder, settings – but only when you navigate to that specified search target). Bottomline – turning off web search in start menu = speed regedit/use at own discretion: HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer “DisableSearchBoxSuggestions”=dword:00000001"

kwhitefoot 4y ago

Reading the comments here makes me wonder why any of you use MS Windows. Is there something that all of you must have that only runs on Windows?

fidgewidge 4y ago
I can't get my gf to use a Mac (she does it if she has to). It's just familiarity, there's no other reason. Macs have a million arbitrary and pointless differences to Windows due to their long history that are grains of sand in the eyes of someone who doesn't care about computers, they just get in the way and frustrate people. I use Macs though and much prefer it. Apple still has a relatively disciplined and competent engineering org. Everything in Windows is kinda broken/unreliable and it seems to be getting worse over time. Their insistence on using C++ for everything even in 2023 is killing them - bugs like heap corruption in search services shouldn't be happening but stuff like that is everywhere. Windows 10 is indeed abandonware like the article asks, they only really improve 11 now.
brucedawson 4y ago
Switching is a huge hassle, with uncertainty about whether things will actually be better or not, or if I will just hit different problems. Windows is actually excellent in many ways (see the tools I used to analyze this) so I would definitely be missing some things. So, momentum plus uncertainty about whether other environments are actually better or just different. Plus my job.

sizzle 4y ago

The lagging inputs in Windows reminds me of the concept of a “Windows Minute” Definition: A reference to time where the culculated period bears no connection to the reality of that time span. Used to understate the significance of accurate measurement. Origin: Microsoft Windows' inability to convey an accurate file download, or transfer, time. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20minute https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20mi... The lag in Windows is what made me switch to Mac, Using Finder and Spotlight and managing applications in the Applications folder made me never want to experience Windows again.