5 ms·

UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

44 points by kentnguyen 15y ago

fudged 15y ago
I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse-annoyances/ http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...
- dguaraglia 15y ago
  I still have to find a situation (outside of gaming, where I suppose it's key to the experience) where this 'lag' bothered me at all. In fact, I've been using a Mac for almost a year now and wasn't it for that article, I would have never even noticed there was a lag.
  - fudged 15y ago
    Gamers are probably the most affected by this. Similarly, music apps on Android are affected by the audio lag problems.
- daed 15y ago
  To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair. Noticeably slower than windows.
  - lobster_johnson 15y ago
    I think one of the reasons is that OS X provides automatic double-buffering of window content at the OS level (it also has a somewhat different drawing model than Windows), which adds a bit of latency but reduces flicker. Another factor is that Mac apps typically adapt themselves to the size of a window, and resizing will trigger a redraw of everything. Apps like Mail have always been really slow at redrawing themselves, whereas Chrome is very fast. OS X was written from the ground up to be graphics-intensive. From very early on, Quartz, OS X's compositing manager, has been using the GPU to render windows to OpenGL textures, essentially using the graphics card's very fast 3D support to render a 2D screen. Windows's classic GDI (which has been replaced by Aero, afaik, but I guess most apps are still GDI) is considerably simpler, and leaves the drawing entirely to the application. This is the reason you see a lot more redraw flickering in Windows apps. Some apps are so slow at redrawing that when you resize the window to make it bigger, you can see the new unpainted areas filled with various garbage (or with some default background colour at best) before the actual content comes in. To create smooth, non-flickering widget drawing in Windows you have always been forced to do the double-buffering yourself. Even in Windows 7 there is a lot of redraw flickering. I'm particularly annoyed about how the mouse cursor tend to flicker randomly -- eg. when Internet Explorer is loading a page -- which is such a small, trivial detail, but one that ends up making the entire OS feel shoddily built.
    - lobster_johnson 15y ago
      Oh, and OS X actually resizes windows at a fixed frame rate. You can change the rate with: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001
- LesZedCB 15y ago
  I remember reading this before, and I thought the OP said he didn't have lion at the time. Though looking over it again, he said it still supposedly exists in Lion. However, I am running lion, and experience no more mouse lag then what exists in windows. I distinctly remember the problem in Snow Leopard, which I only just upgraded from about a month ago. Maybe it's self-deceiving fanboy thinking, but I don't experience this anymore. Even in gaming, in some of the open-gl ports of steam games, they seem to run beautifully in 10.7.
dbcooper 15y ago
This submission needed some actual data ...
- tambourine_man 15y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I was exited to read it, as this is the kind of thing that sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares, but was disappointed. No mesurament, nothing.
- huggyface 15y ago
  This was precisely my response to it as well. Indeed, I have to confess that I quickly skim linked articles from here, and if they seem to be largely narrative/opinion, I hit back. There just isn't enough time in the day to read yet another subjective opinion: Give me the facts.
- augustl 15y ago
  From the article: > I’m not an OS-engineer but my guess is that [...] Indeed.
Schlaefer 15y ago
I never thought I would say this: but I miss the OS X spinning-wheel-o-death … on my non-current generation iOS device. Sometimes the software just does nothing for a noticeable amount of time and you don't know if it didn't got the input or just hangs.
- freehunter 15y ago
  I find myself holding my phone against my ear occasionally to see if I can hear the drive spinning. I feel like a fool every time when I remember there are no moving parts, but if my Zune would hang, or my iPod before that, I could tell if it was hung or if it was just crunching away. That's one thing I really miss since I went to using an Ubuntu HP Touchpad instead of a laptop, there's no flashing hard drive indicator to let me know if it's still working or if it's just hung.
dristic 15y ago
I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.
- ben_straub 15y ago
  OSX has definite advantages here. 1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against. 2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling. 3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.
  - neebz 15y ago
    regarding #2.. I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that (maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how much crap scrolling is in Windows.
    - dristic 15y ago
      I completely agree with this. I was a dedicated Windows user but I never realized all its shortcomings, scrolling being a big one.
    - emehrkay 15y ago
      I currently have a vm of windows 7 open on my mac with the host file open in notepad. Two lines are selected (as I needed to copy them from time to time). If that window loses focus, the selection stays, but if I click the titlebar to that window, giving it focus again, those two lines are unselected. There are many many quirks like this in Windows that you only notice once you use a different window manager.
blinkingled 15y ago
Speaking of anecdotes, I have always found Windows more responsive than OS X to the point where I have completely switched to Win 7 - mouse handling and screen drawing is definitely superior on Windows. However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make Windows feel laggy.
- haddr 15y ago
  i true that. as a relatively new mac user i felt response time better on windows. also this blog post is missing any numbers... so it's just author's subjective feelings?
- brudgers 15y ago
  That and considering that shrink wrapped consumer anti-virus has become paid malware (reports your browsing history, slows down your machine, and renews on your credit card automatically), it is unsurprising that Microsoft provides no-cost anti-virus which is both fast and unobtrusive.
- tejaswiy 15y ago
  I agree with this. Subjective opinions etc., but I think the animations on the mac, although they start pretty much instantaneously when you click, take time to finish and so the actual process of clicking -> window coming up / folder opening up take a little more time on the mac
zobzu 15y ago
There's many reasons to prefer OSX over Windows (and vice-versa) But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI).
mariusmg 15y ago
Unless people can back this up with hard facts they simply shouldn't post these kinds of stuff.
andersh 15y ago
Amazing the drivel that can make it to the HN front page sometimes. I'm afraid that, objectively, this guy is a speculating ignoramus.
ender7 15y ago
I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely impressed with iOS's graphical performance. It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth. I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's as if they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.
- zokier 15y ago
  This is why good game hardware (CPU/GPU) benchmarks measure minimum framerate in addition to average. There was some site that measured 99th percentile framerates too, which seemed like a good idea. edit: Example of better measurements: http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 Notice how Radeons have lower avg fps but the framerate seems more stable.
baddox 15y ago
I completely agree with the iOS vs. Android responsiveness difference, but completely disagree that Windows 7 on a fast PC with an SSD is unresponsive. I've literally never had any of those problems on my Windows 7 gaming machine.
aresant 15y ago
My favorite explanation of this phenomenon, beyond the visual demonstration, is that lag time reminds the human mind that it is interfacing with a machine. Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between the user and his work. UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
zyb09 15y ago
Well there's no denying iOS is the king of responsiveness in the mobile sector, but to be honest, I can't really say the same thing on OS X vs Windows 7. I use both on a daily basis and Win7 is definitely the most rock solid OS Microsoft ever put out. For example, when an application crashes Windows just kills it and everything is fine. On OS X when something crashes, you can usually Force Close, but sometimes the process just can't be killed. Also it feels OS X memory management almost requires an SSD nowadays. There are other things, which makes me like OS X more, but being faster or more stable is not one of them.
- christoph 15y ago
  I can't agree with this enough. I use both daily and my feelings match yours 100%. I find crashes far more disruptive on OS X - argh...the dreaded spinning beach ball. Windows app crashes (when they happen) rarely cause me any harm beyond restarting that single app and telling Windows I don't want to send a bug report to MS. I'm always blown away when picking up the iPad just how seamlessly I can fly between different apps, tabs, airplay, etc.
bratsche 15y ago
Another thing which OSX has done for a long time that I really liked is that everything syncs to vertical refresh. It doesn't actually speed anything up, but it gives the perception that things are smoother and more responsive. You don't see the 'tearing' effect that you often see on other systems when you drag windows around the screen.
darreld 15y ago
I use both platforms with a MacBook Pro/Lion being my main machine. I have always felt that my Windows 7 machine is snappier in starting apps and generally moving around the desktop. In fact, if Windows 7 were *nix based I would probably switch to it as my primary. The command processor situation feels pretty hopeless to me in Windows.
badkangaroo 15y ago
Is this a troll thread? if so 10/10
runjake 15y ago
I have experienced the exact opposite of what this person experienced. I use both Windows and OS X all through the day and while the response on both is adequate, the Core 2 Quad Windows 7 box is much more responsive than my MBP with the high end 15" i7. They both have 8GB RAM -- but then again, my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X200 feels more responsive, and requires fewer resources. I've never experienced or heard of the "infamous" cloned dialogs bug on Windows 7, but oddly, I have experienced it on OS X. Conversely, I've never experienced the reported cursor lag on OS X. Like I said, I find both OSes perfectly good, but the post just seems suspect to me. Now, if only Microsoft would integrate a well-supported, well-integrated, native bash/zsh. I can't bring myself to like Powershell.

44 points by kentnguyen 15y ago

I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse-annoyances/ http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...

dguaraglia 15y ago
I still have to find a situation (outside of gaming, where I suppose it's key to the experience) where this 'lag' bothered me at all. In fact, I've been using a Mac for almost a year now and wasn't it for that article, I would have never even noticed there was a lag.
- fudged 15y ago
  Gamers are probably the most affected by this. Similarly, music apps on Android are affected by the audio lag problems.
daed 15y ago
To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair. Noticeably slower than windows.
- lobster_johnson 15y ago
  I think one of the reasons is that OS X provides automatic double-buffering of window content at the OS level (it also has a somewhat different drawing model than Windows), which adds a bit of latency but reduces flicker. Another factor is that Mac apps typically adapt themselves to the size of a window, and resizing will trigger a redraw of everything. Apps like Mail have always been really slow at redrawing themselves, whereas Chrome is very fast. OS X was written from the ground up to be graphics-intensive. From very early on, Quartz, OS X's compositing manager, has been using the GPU to render windows to OpenGL textures, essentially using the graphics card's very fast 3D support to render a 2D screen. Windows's classic GDI (which has been replaced by Aero, afaik, but I guess most apps are still GDI) is considerably simpler, and leaves the drawing entirely to the application. This is the reason you see a lot more redraw flickering in Windows apps. Some apps are so slow at redrawing that when you resize the window to make it bigger, you can see the new unpainted areas filled with various garbage (or with some default background colour at best) before the actual content comes in. To create smooth, non-flickering widget drawing in Windows you have always been forced to do the double-buffering yourself. Even in Windows 7 there is a lot of redraw flickering. I'm particularly annoyed about how the mouse cursor tend to flicker randomly -- eg. when Internet Explorer is loading a page -- which is such a small, trivial detail, but one that ends up making the entire OS feel shoddily built.
  - lobster_johnson 15y ago
    Oh, and OS X actually resizes windows at a fixed frame rate. You can change the rate with: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001
LesZedCB 15y ago
I remember reading this before, and I thought the OP said he didn't have lion at the time. Though looking over it again, he said it still supposedly exists in Lion. However, I am running lion, and experience no more mouse lag then what exists in windows. I distinctly remember the problem in Snow Leopard, which I only just upgraded from about a month ago. Maybe it's self-deceiving fanboy thinking, but I don't experience this anymore. Even in gaming, in some of the open-gl ports of steam games, they seem to run beautifully in 10.7.

dbcooper 15y ago

This submission needed some actual data ...

tambourine_man 15y ago
My thoughts exactly. I was exited to read it, as this is the kind of thing that sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares, but was disappointed. No mesurament, nothing.
huggyface 15y ago
This was precisely my response to it as well. Indeed, I have to confess that I quickly skim linked articles from here, and if they seem to be largely narrative/opinion, I hit back. There just isn't enough time in the day to read yet another subjective opinion: Give me the facts.
augustl 15y ago
From the article: > I’m not an OS-engineer but my guess is that [...] Indeed.

Schlaefer 15y ago

I never thought I would say this: but I miss the OS X spinning-wheel-o-death … on my non-current generation iOS device. Sometimes the software just does nothing for a noticeable amount of time and you don't know if it didn't got the input or just hangs.

freehunter 15y ago
I find myself holding my phone against my ear occasionally to see if I can hear the drive spinning. I feel like a fool every time when I remember there are no moving parts, but if my Zune would hang, or my iPod before that, I could tell if it was hung or if it was just crunching away. That's one thing I really miss since I went to using an Ubuntu HP Touchpad instead of a laptop, there's no flashing hard drive indicator to let me know if it's still working or if it's just hung.

dristic 15y ago

I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.

ben_straub 15y ago
OSX has definite advantages here. 1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against. 2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling. 3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.
- neebz 15y ago
  regarding #2.. I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that (maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how much crap scrolling is in Windows.
  - dristic 15y ago
    I completely agree with this. I was a dedicated Windows user but I never realized all its shortcomings, scrolling being a big one.
  - emehrkay 15y ago
    I currently have a vm of windows 7 open on my mac with the host file open in notepad. Two lines are selected (as I needed to copy them from time to time). If that window loses focus, the selection stays, but if I click the titlebar to that window, giving it focus again, those two lines are unselected. There are many many quirks like this in Windows that you only notice once you use a different window manager.

blinkingled 15y ago

Speaking of anecdotes, I have always found Windows more responsive than OS X to the point where I have completely switched to Win 7 - mouse handling and screen drawing is definitely superior on Windows. However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make Windows feel laggy.

haddr 15y ago
i true that. as a relatively new mac user i felt response time better on windows. also this blog post is missing any numbers... so it's just author's subjective feelings?
brudgers 15y ago
That and considering that shrink wrapped consumer anti-virus has become paid malware (reports your browsing history, slows down your machine, and renews on your credit card automatically), it is unsurprising that Microsoft provides no-cost anti-virus which is both fast and unobtrusive.
tejaswiy 15y ago
I agree with this. Subjective opinions etc., but I think the animations on the mac, although they start pretty much instantaneously when you click, take time to finish and so the actual process of clicking -> window coming up / folder opening up take a little more time on the mac

zobzu 15y ago

There's many reasons to prefer OSX over Windows (and vice-versa) But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI).

mariusmg 15y ago

Unless people can back this up with hard facts they simply shouldn't post these kinds of stuff.

andersh 15y ago

Amazing the drivel that can make it to the HN front page sometimes. I'm afraid that, objectively, this guy is a speculating ignoramus.

ender7 15y ago

I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely impressed with iOS's graphical performance. It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth. I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's as if they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

zokier 15y ago
This is why good game hardware (CPU/GPU) benchmarks measure minimum framerate in addition to average. There was some site that measured 99th percentile framerates too, which seemed like a good idea. edit: Example of better measurements: http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 Notice how Radeons have lower avg fps but the framerate seems more stable.

baddox 15y ago

I completely agree with the iOS vs. Android responsiveness difference, but completely disagree that Windows 7 on a fast PC with an SSD is unresponsive. I've literally never had any of those problems on my Windows 7 gaming machine.

aresant 15y ago

My favorite explanation of this phenomenon, beyond the visual demonstration, is that lag time reminds the human mind that it is interfacing with a machine. Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between the user and his work. UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

zyb09 15y ago

Well there's no denying iOS is the king of responsiveness in the mobile sector, but to be honest, I can't really say the same thing on OS X vs Windows 7. I use both on a daily basis and Win7 is definitely the most rock solid OS Microsoft ever put out. For example, when an application crashes Windows just kills it and everything is fine. On OS X when something crashes, you can usually Force Close, but sometimes the process just can't be killed. Also it feels OS X memory management almost requires an SSD nowadays. There are other things, which makes me like OS X more, but being faster or more stable is not one of them.

christoph 15y ago
I can't agree with this enough. I use both daily and my feelings match yours 100%. I find crashes far more disruptive on OS X - argh...the dreaded spinning beach ball. Windows app crashes (when they happen) rarely cause me any harm beyond restarting that single app and telling Windows I don't want to send a bug report to MS. I'm always blown away when picking up the iPad just how seamlessly I can fly between different apps, tabs, airplay, etc.

bratsche 15y ago

Another thing which OSX has done for a long time that I really liked is that everything syncs to vertical refresh. It doesn't actually speed anything up, but it gives the perception that things are smoother and more responsive. You don't see the 'tearing' effect that you often see on other systems when you drag windows around the screen.

darreld 15y ago

I use both platforms with a MacBook Pro/Lion being my main machine. I have always felt that my Windows 7 machine is snappier in starting apps and generally moving around the desktop. In fact, if Windows 7 were *nix based I would probably switch to it as my primary. The command processor situation feels pretty hopeless to me in Windows.

badkangaroo 15y ago

Is this a troll thread? if so 10/10

runjake 15y ago

I have experienced the exact opposite of what this person experienced. I use both Windows and OS X all through the day and while the response on both is adequate, the Core 2 Quad Windows 7 box is much more responsive than my MBP with the high end 15" i7. They both have 8GB RAM -- but then again, my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X200 feels more responsive, and requires fewer resources. I've never experienced or heard of the "infamous" cloned dialogs bug on Windows 7, but oddly, I have experienced it on OS X. Conversely, I've never experienced the reported cursor lag on OS X. Like I said, I find both OSes perfectly good, but the post just seems suspect to me. Now, if only Microsoft would integrate a well-supported, well-integrated, native bash/zsh. I can't bring myself to like Powershell.