29 ms·

Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

• cebert 2y ago
  For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.
  • dylan604 2y ago
    There's an old quote about "why would I pay to have the code written more efficiently when processors are constantly getting faster and harddrives are constantly getting bigger?" that always comes to mind about MS software. I don't know the validity of that quote to be any more accurate than the 640k memory one, but it always just had the feel of authenticity by everything you see as circumstantial evidence
    • Retric 2y ago
      The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.
      • nomel 2y ago
        My tinfoil hat told me that they're in cahoots with the big PC manufacturers, and use it as a part of planned obsolescence.
      • gosub100 2y ago
        Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
        • RedShift1 2y ago
          They have been breaking things left and right for quite some time now, I don't think they care about this anymore.
    • dbg31415 2y ago
      It feels like they’ve always taken the approach: “Why rewrite anything when we can just add more virtualization?” In the short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years, it’s clear that it’s become a mountain of technical debt—one that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.
  • cjbgkagh 2y ago
    The point of the virtue signaling is that it’s cheaper than actual virtue while retaining much of the same benefit. Practicing virtue signaling and not virtue is pretty natural.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • Dwedit 2y ago
    The real impact is in Microsoft making people throw away perfectly good computers by ending Windows 10 support.
  • _Algernon_ 2y ago
    They don't care about the climate impact. They care about the green washing PR. Probably decided that the cost of fixing this outweighs the potential PR benefit.
  • kotaKat 2y ago
    It's funny that they give you a whole Greenpeace lecture in the Settings app now about carbon footprint and how Microsoft is committed to lowering it and that you're a terrible person for having your brightness at 100%, but then spins around on this and shoves Office in boot...
• gibibit 2y ago
  I still can't believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it loads/paginates it. On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
  • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    It's essentially a giant XML file, so it's not going to win awards for speed or efficiency.
    • int_19h 2y ago
      Modern hardware can parse XML with speeds measured in hundreds of megabytes per second.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 2y ago
    I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy. The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
    • nine_k 2y ago
      I'd say that Office 97 was the pinnacle. I think you can still reasonably use it if you happen to have a copy. This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(
  • dcan 2y ago
    Try reading a 40+ page document with track changes enabled (and 100+ changes) - it pins a full CPU core for 5 seconds when you go to the next page!
• ghurtado 2y ago
  I'm more surprised that this is news than anything else. If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
  • coliveira 2y ago
    Maybe they're only now making this public so people will believe that Office will start faster!
  • conductr 2y ago
    What exactly does this mean given I definitely sit there staring at a loading / app launch screen when opening Excel if the app isn’t already opened. If it’s opened already, opening another file is much much faster.
    • SietrixDev 2y ago
      For me it's exactly other way around. First window is fast, another file is slow.
  • Spooky23 2y ago
    It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big virtual app these days.
• rappatic 2y ago
  Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.
  • ghurtado 2y ago
    > Why on startup? Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    > When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself. If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
    • theandrewbailey 2y ago
      That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.
    • mr_toad 2y ago
      Is this just a fancy name for (re)starting the application in the background?
  • EGreg 2y ago
    Windows Startup is slow, so Microsoft makes Windows start up silently in the background even when computer should be powered off. Oh btw every joke has a grain of truth (sigh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712108
• marcodiego 2y ago
  That's is not a new idea. I think Office 97 had an accelerated startup that made windows take a little longer the boot but faster the start office.
  • DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    From memory, Office 97 had that dedicated Office shortcut bar on the desktop that it inherited from Office 95, but that was more of a proto-Quick-Launch-bar than a startup accelerator. Though because the bar necessarily needed to load some Office DLLs from disk I can see how that would have given Word/Excel/etc a modest startup boost.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • michaelt 2y ago
    Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as their application loaded, because of course it takes time for applications to load.
    • theandrewbailey 2y ago
      Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.
      • SauciestGNU 2y ago
        Consult a physician if your web app displays a throbber for longer than four hours.
    • snkzxbs 2y ago
      Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.
      • o11c 2y ago
        To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen. I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup. On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared. These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
• dankwizard 2y ago
  It's a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!
• sherdil2022 2y ago
  Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.
• naikrovek 2y ago
  Fucken genius. Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else. I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in any way. I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen? All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important. “CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing even if it is dotnet. Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. PARAMOUNT! — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions. This world is going to shit so fecking fast
  • ipcress_file 2y ago
    Given that Office ran on my 486 and Word and Excel did everything back then that I still need them to do today, a slow startup time on modern hardware is ridiculous. Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for those who need them.
    • spicybright 2y ago
      I wish libreoffice was better. I've tried replacing office with it and every time it has the weirdest stuff going on. UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed to the undo stack. I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never been a viable alternative for so long.
      • ipcress_file 2y ago
        I bought Softmaker Office last year. The Textmaker word processor is better than LibreOffice Writer. It's more MS Office compatible, so I don't get complaints about formatting issues from co-workers.
• CuriousRose 2y ago
  I've not had the greatest relationship with Apple software lately, however seeing every "great idea" that comes out of the Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing Apple needs going forward.
  • spicybright 2y ago
    You're not wrong, I don't know anyone that likes all these new features. I wonder if it even matters though. Corporations are always going to use it, and the cheapest laptops will always come with it.
• _--__--__ 2y ago
  I genuinely don't know if it was a bug or intentional behavior like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave several of its background browser engine processes running indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they're just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their convenience of their devs.
  • RiverCrochet 2y ago
    Chrome would do that too unless the setting "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" is turned off. https://superuser.com/questions/269385/why-does-google-chrome-leave-running-processes-behind-even-after-closing-the-bro https://superuser.com/questions/269385/why-does-google-chrom... Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not child processes for unknown client apps.
    • whyoh 2y ago
      That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge WebView2.
      • hinkley 2y ago
        Mmm. It was definitely a problem with IE but you did in fact say Edge.
  • whyoh 2y ago
    Both behaviors are intentional and (for now) configurable.[1][2] [1] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/167068-how-enable-disable-startup-boost-microsoft-edge-chromium.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/167068-how-enable-disabl... [2] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/160140-disable-continue-running-background-apps-when-microsoft-edge-closed.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/160140-disable-continue-...
• moralestapia 2y ago
  Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?
  • spicybright 2y ago
    How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.
    • nomel 2y ago
      Related, long ago I replaced the windows shell with hl.exe, so my computer booted straight into Half Life rather than explorer. With my one core system, it was a noticeable improvement.
      • spicybright 2y ago
        Lots of people keep a windows machine around for that one game that doesn't run on linux. Might make a come back!
    • moralestapia 2y ago
      You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case. Where did you saw that?
      • moralestapia 2y ago
        Update: nowhere, xi was just making stuff up. Many such cases.
        • spicybright 1y ago
          I'm not sure what TFA or xi means, but any program you install can stay open in the background for quick launching. What makes you think microsoft has exclusive access to doing that?
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  All I'm hearing is prefetch was put into new packaging and MS is calling it a new feature. Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature. Dev1: Superfetch! Dev2: We already did that. Dev1: Superfetch for Office! Management: Yes. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-right-gentlemen https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-right-gentlemen https://windowsground.com/what-is-superfetch-windows-10-should-i-disable-it/#what_does_superfetch_do_in_windows_10 https://windowsground.com/what-is-superfetch-windows-10-shou...
• bitwize 2y ago
  This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a program that the preload procedure didn't account for. Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.
  • theandrewbailey 2y ago
    Windows 7 did the same thing. Windows 7 was perceived as better than Vista, in part because hardware and drivers had improved in the meantime.
    • maximus-decimus 2y ago
      At the end, my windows 7 machine would take an hour to boot if I remember right because Windows used 100% of my hard drive to do god knows what. Windows 7 at the end was literally unusable without an ssd.
• vjvjvjvjghv 2y ago
  [flagged]
• gerdesj 2y ago
  MSO defaults to "load at startup". LibreOffice will if you let it (there is a small difference in propriety here). The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn't really MSO but looks like it is, or is it?) Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).
• geor9e 2y ago
  Fine with me. If 100% of my RAM isn't in use at all times for low priority speculative cache, then it's not doing what I want. So long as it frees up the RAM instantly the moment anything actually requests it.
• everdrive 2y ago
  Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I'm sure that no on else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to load quickly.
  • nashashmi 2y ago
    I think Adobe PDF reader loaded incredibly slowly and they used a preloader
  • cosmotic 2y ago
    My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-running-background-apps-feature/ https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...
    • mrandish 2y ago
      At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported. Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back. Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?
      • milch 2y ago
        Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
• mrandish 2y ago
  Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?" I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.
  • Spooky23 2y ago
    You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.
    • mrandish 2y ago
      Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info. If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
      • bflesch 2y ago
        OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
• CyberDildonics 2y ago
  Every program tries to run on windows startup and people wonder why their computer gets slower over time. Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the crap.
• nine_k 2y ago
  Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox. Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off. (And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
  • eviks 2y ago
    > why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck? To instantly find any file anywhere, nice productivity boost (among many)
    • _Algernon_ 2y ago
      Really? Windows isn't exactly known for the quality of it's search. It becoming consistently worse with every Windows version has been a meme for at more than a decade.
      • eviks 2y ago
        But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search
        • nine_k 2y ago
          > "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows. Well, on Linux I have `locate` and `fd` which work really well, doing that very thing, and `ripgrep` does even more. I heard something built-in is also shipped with macOS, it's called something like "Spotlight". OTOH MS Excel for Windows is one and only, the macOS version barely holds a candle to it, and analogs are even further away.
          • eviks 2y ago
            "that very thing" was instant and anywhere (not your irrelevant generic description), which your suggested tools can't do. You're just content with a poor cli substitute.
• xyst 2y ago
  Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• jackconsidine 2y ago
  Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints. The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer. We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this
  • bflesch 2y ago
    They already have the "wallpaper of the day" feature with small description text to keep you busy while waiting.
• al_borland 2y ago
  I have a habit of uninstalling any programs that take it upon themselves to start up on boot without me specifically requesting it. Any company with that little respect for the user isn’t one I want to be involved with.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  Well, Libre/OpenOffice does the same, but lets not get that in the way of a good Microsoft bashing round.
  • vachina 2y ago
    One is open source free software, another is paid software backed by a billion dollar cap company. It’s a miracle OpenOffice worked at all. They’re not the same.
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      Only if ignoring history, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
  • badmintonbaseba 2y ago
    I don't see any LibreOffice related processes on my Debian machine, but I have it installed. Does it do that on Windows only, or distros disable this by default?
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/148 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/148
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        > LibreOffice can be set to open on Windows startup So, Windows only, and "can be set", probably not the default?
        • pjmlp 2y ago
          The installer enables it by default unless you go through custom installation.
• snappr021 2y ago
  Microsoft is too slow full stop. When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?
  • lionkor 2y ago
    Proton made games run well on Linux, maybe all it takes is one big company picking up wine, and making it run all the different office software? It cannot be that hard.
    • margorczynski 2y ago
      I think its harder with "standard" software as it uses the Windows UI toolkit and stuff. Games usually only require an empty window to render + all the GUI is custom in DirectX/Vulkan/etc.
  • mike_hearn 2y ago
    Industry standard software like what, MS Office?
    • quaestio 2y ago
      Solidworks, RFEM, other niche applications only run on Windows... I made the switch to Google Workspace and Docs years ago... At a recent company used the Microsoft largely for teams, but there are so many unnecessary headaches and time consuming log-ins (each taking a few seconds that continually add up) that the next paradigm cannot come soon enough... The best way off Microsoft is via the browser... Vanilla JS Webgl etc Prediction: we are less than a year away from this becoming a reality... Edit: Possible solution: simply boot into a browser, with an underlying cloud syncing filesystem with trusted circles of sharing... How many seconds would be required to go from power button to accepting input in this paradigm?
  • herbst 2y ago
    Depending on the industrie there is really nothing holding them back other than dirty Microsoft deals and lazy bosses
• rvba 2y ago
  30% of code is written by AI! The biggest problem is sharepoint. You save your files "somewhere" and links between them barely work
• blitzar 2y ago
  To be fair to Microsoft, Excel crashes far less frequently than it did 10 years ago so that is something I guess. I would put the "productivity gains" from that alone at +40%.
  • iLoveOncall 2y ago
    Probably because you have a way better computer. My girlfriend and I work in the same company, I have an M1 mac because I'm a dev and she has a shitty Dell laptop with Windows. Sometimes it's easier for her to send me an Excel, make the edit for her and send it back, because Excel constantly hangs on her laptop.
    • nitch-193 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      Companies will buy the cheapest, shittiest PCs/laptops and wonder why their slow or people are unproductive. Apple have their share of issues, but at least they won't sell you completely useless laptops. The minute someone is using a computer and it's noticeably slow their brain will start looking for something else to do and they'll lose any momentum on whatever task they where working on.
  • bambax 2y ago
    Excel 2003 never crashes. It's a little bit limited in number of lines and columns (but if you need that many you should probably be using a proper db).
    • blitzar 2y ago
      Gotta have XLOOKUP if you are going to compete these days. It might be aimed at the more casual audience and party gamers but it is the meta.
• pizza234 2y ago
  Libreoffice/Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith, always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard. On the other hand, it's disappointing, since I remember early M$ Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that there was some preloading going on).
  • o11c 2y ago
    This does not appear to be the case for LibreOffice in my tests.
    • Mashimo 2y ago
      I think you can choose to use the feature on installation. I don't know if it's on or off by default. But it is a thing that exist (with the windows installer)
    • pizza234 1y ago
      There's an option in Options->General, called Quickstarter. I think it's disabled by default.
• kilotaras 2y ago
  Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus. Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others. One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.
  • threatripper 2y ago
    The solution is simple: New OKRs and KPIs in the next cycle reversing some of the current ones, then new bonuses for reaching them. Repeat.
    • taneq 2y ago
      “I could do this all day!”
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    Then the OS team will fight back with options to disable all of these startup things. Like the Startup tab in Windows Task Manager with an "impact" column and easy button to disable annoying startup programs. It's interesting to even see it play out within the same company.
    • macleginn 2y ago
      The only impact values I see on my home machine are "Not measured" and "None".
  • vasco 2y ago
    Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.
    • andruby 2y ago
      That could already be the case. The initial release is from 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old. I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".
• atoav 2y ago
  As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me. Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying to be performant. They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page, items whose data makes up less than 1% of the javascript they are loading. Meanwhile you could literally give people all items with no javascript and be faster (if you have the luxury of knowing the number of items).
  • zifpanachr23 2y ago
    I don't think many of us find it acceptable judging by the comments here. Programmers aren't the target audience though, the actual target audience probably has no idea how much faster these things can and should run.
• shermozle 2y ago
  This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it becomes a "feature" you can trumpet, rather than a bug you squashed.
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.
    • snackbroken 2y ago
      A casual googling tells me Amphastar produces both morphine and naloxone. Presumably they aren't the only pharma company that produces both a drug and its antidote, they were just my first hit.
    • bgro 2y ago
      What? This is what lobbying is. Intuit TurboTax. Realpage. Then entire insurance industry. TSA easy check or whatever it’s called. Fully fabricated problems with fabricated solutions often becoming legally required to be purchased to avoid the problem they cause in the first place.
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        > Then entire insurance industry. Could you elaborate? How does the insurance industry create problems like bad weather and misfortune?
        • bgro 2y ago
          Car theft is on the rise. Rather than investigate or cooperate with police or policies they can just pay out the loss and lobby against crime reduction in a variety of ways. Then, because they paid a loss they can raise that persons amount they pay due to a rising “risk.” Then everybody’s rates can rise because of this problem. The larger the cost, the bigger total cash value they can get on their percentage based profit. Playing into the cost, they can cut deals with manufacturers directly or in lobbying for parts to be artificially inflated to make this problem even worse. Plastic fuel valve maybe costs 30 cents to manufacture but is sold for $900 and that price is doubled to install it. And the car isn’t safe to drive without it so insurance can demand you pay up or deny all coverage or payouts. Same for medical inflation though that’s more commonly discussed. If insurance didn’t exist as a service then these inflated prices would be dramatically cut down. We see this when you don’t use insurance at a doctors office or pharmacy checkout. Though insurance can sometimes demand insurance be used regardless of your consent simply if the cashier is aware they have insurance. Lobbying and passively steering the direction into bloating end users cost is massively incentivized wherever possible for insurance. Then hiding behind a veil of blame to avoid accountability or even just fair payouts when you actually need them. It’s like insurance is the IRS who runs a casino and they threaten you if you win the jackpot and then threaten to “randomly” select you for audit if you proceed to cash out for the full amount instead of a $25 Red Robin gift card.
• amarcheschi 2y ago
  I had a professor who worked for Microsoft with something related to coding some parts of driver installation or similar thing. He literally has Vietnam flashbacks if working at Microsoft comes out as a topic when talking
• tacker2000 2y ago
  They should increase the speed of Excel on Mac. Not sure why its always so slow when entering data, etc… There is a noticeable lag when you enter something in a cell and then hit enter.
• bgro 2y ago
  This is the kind of genius move you get when all your devs play leetcode all day and then have leetcode battles as an interview service. Hundreds of millions of hours spent microfussing over leetcode and gatekeeping work because your solution isn’t copied from the top 5 solutions character for character. Only for the same devs to just abandon all optimization in the real job where it actually matters and implement an o(n^2) fraudulent time metric bypass.
  • vultour 2y ago
    Don't worry, Principal Engineer Copilot will fix all their issues.
  • cornholio 2y ago
    Coding interviews used to be FizzBuzz in the era of Joel Spolsky, then Google upped the bar to things like A*, Boyer Moore and brain teasers with pirates splitting booty to screen for those "real 10x geniuses". Then everybody jumped on that cargocult because Google is a trillion dollar company, so they must be doing something right, am I rite, never-mind their immense monopolies and first mover advantages. So now everybody was looking for the mythical 10xers It all metastasized into the present where you have poor college kids in India grinding Leetcode to get SDET jobs for some Bangalore outsource center. I can't even
    • windward 2y ago
      My knowledge of the subject is entirely second-hand, but my understanding is that the kind of interview you refer to Google doing used to be called a 'Microsoft interview'! See ISBN 0316778494 Nevertheless I broadly agree.
• meta-level 2y ago
  What a mess..
• xyproto 2y ago
  Derp.
• solardev 2y ago
  What useful major features had Office even gained since 97?
• yallpendantools 2y ago
  I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now. It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows land. In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be expected. I thought I've made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes ages for the prompt to even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input. After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---drumroll---NodeJS. Don't quote me on this but I think Node brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal. Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such that Node doesn't actually do anything unless I invoke it myself. The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without having ran `node` beforehand.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    Node is doing stuff when you just try to open a terminal window? How does that work?!
• h1fra 2y ago
  I don't like a lot of things about Apple, but one thing I'm sure is I'm never going back to Windows
• rahen 2y ago
  Headlines like this make me glad that org-mode has almost completely replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for me (not to mention calendar notifications and Python notebooks). The only exception is spreadsheets with charts, which still require LibreOffice. Granted, I don’t work in a corporate environment, so I’m free to choose my own tools. Living in Emacs is a blessing in today’s world of bloat, lack of control, short-lived cycles, and SaaS everything.
• Zamicol 2y ago
  The Cat in the Hat Comes Back engineering. Can't fix problems in a project? Increase the scope to make more problems elsewhere. Soon tentacles emerge, everything has problems, and your project doesn't look as relatively bad.
• Havoc 2y ago
  Office in general is becoming annoying. Like their attempts to force users to use onedrive and sharepoint by hiding existing features and changing the UI around it regularly to maximise confusion. It’s the same chaos as their control panel. And the constant attempt to ram bing down your throat. Switched my desktop to Linux last month cause I’m just fed up with Microsoft’s user hostile bullshit Alas at work I can’t do that
• frou_dh 2y ago
  I think someone said the definition of legacy code is code that makes lots of money.
• QuantumSeed 2y ago
  I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --no-startup-window --win-session-start
  • torben-friis 2y ago
    I haven’t used a windows machine for like 15 years, but back when I was a teenager I could swear computer magazines included all kinds of tips about unchecking things from the auto startup menu, some modifying the registry. Did this pattern stop being a thing and we’re back to it now? Or was it just “forgotten”?
    • abdusco 2y ago
      Autoruns utility still exists. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
      • fireflash38 2y ago
        I wonder if old rules still apply: Uncheck one thing. Reboot. Test system.Proceed to the next item. I bet that loop is way faster nowadays than when I was messing around as a teen trying to get our new 1Gb hard drive desktop to boot faster.
    • bgro 2y ago
      Startup shortcuts are one thing to manage but it’s gotten pretty out of control for most standard software now. Perhaps it used to be one-off annoying programs like 15 years ago. Now there’s scrolling through hundreds of scheduled tasks called dfddg.exe with no title or description and located in c:/windows or %appdata%. Disabling the wrong identically named one bricks your system or software licenses. Then you also have to check the registry and group policy and environment variables and spot the unwanted item that is again often bundled into a critical windows dll. Usually with the same name as the dll and its permissions are set as SYSTEM so you can’t edit it by normal means. Then after every change you have to do a full rebooting and review all steps again. Often, they will regenerate themselves if deleted in the wrong way or the wrong order. After all the startup things are killed there may still be kernel level startup recovery processes for things like Adobe.
• ohgr 2y ago
  It goes really fast if you turn off the connected experiences like linked in, the AI crap, the splash screen, all the cloud shit and crack it with massgrave. Like office 97 speed. There's your problem.
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    I was going to ask: How much faster would it be if it didn't have to communicate with Microsoft servers over the internet on start up. It makes no sense that modern Office won't start faster than Office 97. Sure it has more features, it's bigger in any way, but it's also not running of a spinning hard drive and 32Mb of RAM. Can Office even start up without an Internet connection, or does it just take even longer?
    • ohgr 2y ago
      It works fine on airgapped networks with Ohook https://massgrave.dev/ohook https://massgrave.dev/ohook Office doesn't have to talk to the internet at all other than periodic license checks. I won't run it without Ohook, even though I have a license, because the cloud shit has screwed me a couple of times.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  Once in a while I’m happily reminded that I haven’t had to worry about this circus any more since I switched to Linux some 5 years ago.
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    You can get the same effect by uninstalling Office on Windows. In that you don't have a bloated start time anymore, but also can't use Office.
    • bgro 2y ago
      Windows update reinstalls office even if you never installed it or opened it or own it. It’s reinstalled through most updates and on reboot.
      • Mashimo 2y ago
        Odd, I don't have it on any of my computers.
      • tsimionescu 2y ago
        Office? I've never seen that.
    • immibis 2y ago
      You still have to deal with the rest of Windows.
• jhanschoo 2y ago
  I don't see an issue with this, provided that this is disabled on home PCs by default. For work devices for office work you want this.
• rafaelmn 2y ago
  At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bundled with the OS I paid for. Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable state. I wouldn't be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software providers and move away from Microsoft. Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome project.
  • ashoeafoot 2y ago
    Gaming is the beginning of the end. It gets new users accustomed to a modifyable system and a downgrade from that to windows will become ever harder.
  • smackay 2y ago
    Microsoft at least sees the writing on the wall... Microsoft announces new European digital commitments https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/european-digital-commitments/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...
    • fakedang 2y ago
      Idk, seems stupid, given that Europeans are very aware now of the Cloud Act and other similar shenanigans the USG wants to pull. That being said, European bureaucrats are even stupider and will largely take these commitments at face value, allowing them to have a tighter leash on the market.
    • mrkramer 2y ago
      "We will continue to protect the privacy of European data." Our data is up for grabs since at least 2018[0]. There is no privacy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
• uwagar 2y ago
  and you got no say in it. this is why u need an option like gnu/linux.
• mythz 2y ago
  Abandoning Windows after 25 years for Fedora gets validated with every "Windows Innovation"
• croes 2y ago
  Is the Office dev team part of the 30% id from AI?
• vjk800 2y ago
  I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes painful.
  • krembo 2y ago
    It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.
    • jeroenhd 2y ago
      Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.
      • BarryMilo 2y ago
        It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
        • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
          > It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers. > LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases. Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  Surprising to see after their talk about recent improvement due to rust rewrites of some components..
• nmeofthestate 2y ago
  Microsoft have even managed to make Windows Explorer (a lot) worse in Windows 11. Auto-complete in the address bar completely unresponsive. Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local folder. Interacting with network shares a complete usability mess. Looks a bit nicer though, and there's tabs. Goodness knows who they've got maintaining Windows.
  • diggan 2y ago
    > Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local folder. I thought that was just me, and even though all hard-drives seemed healthy, I was planning on switching the oldest out. But if others are having the same issue, guess they just screwed up the software side of things, like usual.
  • _hao 2y ago
    Give the new FilePilot a try - https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/
  • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    The address bar opens history when you click the delete button too.
  • Ponet1945 2y ago
    Check out https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ It's in beta and no network drives or CJK yet but feels like a breath of fresh air.
  • windward 2y ago
    >Goodness knows who they've got maintaining Windows. Developers who exclusively test on SSDs is my guess. The UI hasn't taken into account any latency from reads. Having a HDD now moves you into power user territory.
  • taspeotis 2y ago
    Microsoft Corporation publish Windows File Manager via the Microsoft Store. https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb
• buyucu 2y ago
  Office is a horrible product. Our company left office a few years ago and it turned out to be a huge productivity boost.
• jbverschoor 2y ago
  Unfortunately,RAM is cheap, but even more unfortunate is that all these lingering processes tend to take some CPU, threads, IO, and even GPU time (dropbox for example. Why the hell do you need GPU acceleration????)
• skc 2y ago
  I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS (Windows 11) Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should these apps actually open? I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.
  • BSDobelix 2y ago
    >I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS Test those things after a reboot (not a cold start) aka "Fast Startup", that's why you have massive uptime when you always shutdown/start and don't do reboot's.
    • skc 2y ago
      Ok so I've just done this and got the same result. It's plenty fast. And this is a pretty average laptop. Dell, Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM. In fact it's Windows 11 Home edition. Now I bet if I tried this same test on my work PC which is supposed to be much beefier I'd probably find that it takes an extra second or two. This being HN I'm almost 100% certain that the only time anyone touches a PC is at work. And work PCs have loads of gunk on them.
  • SietrixDev 2y ago
    I have a different issue. First window of Excel starts fast, but try to open another file and you'd think that I just didn't click on it. 10 second wait times and I'm on a private machine without any corporate bloat.
    • ourmandave 2y ago
      I noticed that too. Double click xlsx outside Excel and wonder if it did anything. But if you open the 2nd spreadsheet (File > Open) from inside Excel, it opens up a lot faster in a separate window.
• amiga386 2y ago
  What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.microsoft.com:80/kb/165071 https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/en/SETUP_GUIDE.html https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/... Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/office-2010/cc178954(v=office.14)#office-startup-assistant https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/o... Are they now bringing it back?
  • barrkel 2y ago
    I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
    • alliao 2y ago
      some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me
      • amiga386 2y ago
        Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_opening_documents_too_slow/ https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
• tossandthrow 2y ago
  Over the next 6 months I need to decide on the platform we roll out for our small startup. Windows is categorically left out. Funnily, it is probably going to be Valve that will be the death of Windows. All my Steam games runs better on Bazzite / Steam OS without any Windows interruption. At some point, this will spread like a wild fire in the gamin community - teaching people about alternatives to Windows. The next generation will not be bothered with Windows.
  • _cenw 2y ago
    I've ran Linux on my laptops since 2012, but avoided it for my desktop. I made the jump last week, and it only took slightly modifying my NixOS config (unlocking amdgpu for instance) for everything to just work. Oblivion Remaster runs noticeably better. Most multiplayer games also just work. And I'm no longer dealing with Windows search randomly not working, SMB connections stalling, random sleep issues... it all just works. I had to invest a little into getting Sunshine to work with virtual displays (like Artemis), but even that took like a day and it'll be easy to set up if I ever need to reinstall.
  • theshackleford 2y ago
    I’ve been hearing some variation of this my entire adult life and it hasn’t been right yet.
    • tossandthrow 2y ago
      Just like ANN's in the 0s
  • int_19h 2y ago
    SteamOS is great right up until the point where you need to play competitive multiplayer games, most of which require kernel-level anti-cheat that doesn't work on Linux.
• jeroenhd 2y ago
  LibreOffice has been doing this for ages, at least on Windows. It works well. And, to be honest, if you're going to be using Office anyway, you may as well speed up launching it. I'm surprised they don't use the existing Windows Prefetching system for this, though.
• _cenw 2y ago
  It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product. Maybe stack ranking does create terrible culture.
  • lifeisgood99 2y ago
    Teams at Microsoft operate like their own mini companies. For example, moving to a different team usually requires doing an interview loop, with coding challenges.
  • cheschire 2y ago
    Microsoft hasn’t used stack ranking for over a decade. I guess the team level competitive culture has persisted though.
• mappu 2y ago
  I think the old Office 97 Shortcut Bar preloaded some Office dlls too, maybe not all of them.
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  If you have an old machine laying around, I highly recommend setting it up with Windows XP and Office XP. It's a breath of fresh air if you have to use Office a lot. Also an agonizing reminder of how far Microsoft has strayed from the light. Office software was a solved problem, and somehow it isn't anymore.
• theothertimcook 2y ago
  Windows 10LTSC gets updates till 2030 something. Office 2016 is the last year before it went OneDrive and will still autosave documents locally. Apparently there are activation scripts that can help you if you’ve lost your license information for these older products…
  • p_ing 2y ago
    Autosave has only ever been a SharePoint/OneDrive feature. You may be confusing it with auto recovery.
• bigpeopleareold 2y ago
  They might as well load the rest of Windows at startup if that is the magic bullet of how many performance issues their OS and software has. It still shocks me that my cheap 8-year old laptop with Fedora on it feels all around snappier and a relief to work with than the computer handed to me at work. That computer would fly with a decent operating system.
• plaidfuji 2y ago
  Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT. The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting. If Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could become a real alternative.
  • resource_waste 2y ago
    I generally agree with what you said. My only issue is that it cannot handle lots of data. Both Docs and Sheets have caused limitations here. Docs gets unusably slow. Sheets just wont work.
    • tantalor 2y ago
      https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9702507?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9702507?hl=en > You can access, analyze, visualize, and share billions of rows of data from your spreadsheet with Connected Sheets, the new BigQuery data connector.
    • crazygringo 2y ago
      Docs stopped getting slow at some point in the past few years. It used to be a nightmare to edit a 150 page file. Now it's no problem at all. Not sure if it has to do with migrating from HTML to canvas for rendering, or totally separate.
  • thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
    I just sorted my drive by last modified ascending, I started using Google Docs in 2008, I don't remember using anything other than that since. I did not realize how many people on HN are still using MS suite, a nice refreshing bubble buster.
  • jacurtis 2y ago
    In Corporate America there is an old saying that goes > "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft Office". Basically if you are the head of IT and you use Microsoft Office, the CEO comes to you and complains it is slow, you can say "Well Microsoft makes it slow". The CEO will shrug and move on. But if you instead get rid of microsoft and move the org to Google WOrkspace, then the CEO comes to you and says "Google Sheets doesn't have this one formula that I use" and you tell them that Google doesn't offer it, the CEO fires you for swithcing away from Microsoft Office. Google Workspace is amazing. But Corporate IT departments just absolutely love paying their Microsoft enterprise subscriptions. So I have to use it for that reason. Like you said, the office UI is horrible. I can't ever find anything. But in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, everything is exactly where I want it. I truly haven't ran into cases where Office products have something significant that Google's workspaces can't. I know there are differences, with office having some more advanced features but I think 99.5% of people don't ever use these advanced features.
• anentropic 2y ago
  Outlook is so bad at email Just utterly basic fundamental stuff that was working forever in other clients, like quoting replied text Everyone at work has to resort to farcical formatting tricks, the email chain ends up a series of people saying like "I added my comments in green bold below", "my comments in blue italic" like it's a Word document instead of a message thread
  • abraxas 2y ago
    It's 20+ years of Microsoft fucking with it and bringing Eternal September to our inboxes. In years prior the email/usenet etiquette was simple: The '>' sign as the first character indicated a quote block in a reply with new content added after the quoted text. Then came Microsoft with its Outlook and Outlook Express. First they fucked with everyone just for the hell of it by making their client top post by default. Then they brought in html into emails and usenet posts. Then they worked hard at it to make everything the mess it is today.
• chaostheory 2y ago
  I’m confused. Doesn’t office 365 online make this completely unnecessary?
• p0w3n3d 2y ago
  Quite a few years ago I read on Reddit a post made allegedly by a Microsoft programmer, who was telling that the young generation of programmers do not want to maintain the old optimized code (he was saying specifically about pipes in windows) and want to reimplement all fro scratch. In this example (pipes) they wrote a new pipe mechanism which then was lacking that ACL et. al. authorisation features and they had to hide it from normal programmers (made it somehow internal to system) What it would mean (if we can believe this) is that Windows becomes a legacy burden and without proper management and knowledge will become a big ball of mud (if it's not yet like this) unbearable and unmabagable. Right now I can access at least five styles of UI, from different epochs, each one is doing something important in the system, BC one cannot rewrite everything to the new style without enormous funds
  • anonymars 2y ago
    Feels like we're living through the bronze-age-collapse of software. It's depressing to watch the software I use get worse and worse and be forced onto the downgrades
  • p_ing 2y ago
    Yeah, I'd take that with a giant grain. You can't "hide" features that the system uses -- they're all visible. This is why NT APIs get used, even though they're not supposed to be leveraged outside of the kernel/critical system components. There's no "hiding" a pipe. Mail Slots are on their way out, though. Not that they're useful today.
• kypro 2y ago
  They did this with IE back in the day right? Not because it was particularly slow, but because the it gave them an advantage over competitors like FF which couldn't use preloaded windows libraries to load as quickly? I might be wrong. I was a kid when I read about this.
• dimgl 2y ago
  Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on. I'm done with it. I've switched to Ubuntu and I haven't looked back. I only boot up my Windows installation when I need to do game development on Unreal or use an incompatible program. But for now, MacOS and Linux are covering everything. I used to be a big gamer but I've basically given up on playing games that don't work on Linux. The selection of games is steadily growing and some games work at launch (like Oblivion Remastered). I know there's a lot of animosity for GNOME, but it's the best Linux desktop in my opinion. In terms of polish it's definitely the closest to MacOS. Application installs are still an absolute pain, but it's gotten better. At the very least I can now go through the Ubuntu App Center to get the most common apps. There's the occassional app that doesn't work (like VLC) and then I'll have to look into Snap or Flatpak or whatever other variation of app packaging Linux devs decide to unleash on the masses... but then it works and I don't think about it again. One last gripe for me is the lack of HDR support in Ubuntu. I can't use my LG C2 with it. But I've switched to using two Dell monitors with DisplayPort and now it doesn't matter... and I use the LG C2 with something else. For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay putting up with this pain if it means never using Windows again.
  • the__alchemist 2y ago
    LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux, is comparably slow and bloated.
    • moooo99 2y ago
      Oh it absolutely is, but at least it’s free
    • dimgl 2y ago
      I haven't used Office tools in over a decade...
• AnonHP 2y ago
  I use LibreOffice for my personal needs, which is spreadsheets (I also donate to Document Foundation to support it). Sadly, even LibreOffice has suffered from being slow to start up, is bloated and sluggish (on Windows and macOS; I have tried it on Linux for a very long time). It seems like all Office-like apps are cursed to be slow and bloated. It also seems like 32GB should be the bare minimum amount of RAM for a Windows machine today (even the “new Teams” app is sluggish nowadays and takes up quite a bit of memory or crashes often).
  • zahlman 2y ago
    I've found arrow-key scrolling through a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet on Linux to be quite painful.
• geodel 2y ago
  Seems at this point any low level code they concern them with is security because it can have legal consequences, or porting to new CPU versions, archs as it can have financial consequences. So C++ is slow? very well write some Typescript/ReactJS frontend. It is slower? No worries, now you can run that in cloud. Anything else is to be taken care AI and crap. Problem solved.
• masfoobar 2y ago
  I have been enjoying the comments on this one. :-) There are sooo many things to unpack in the world of Windows. We could talk about Windows 11. We can talk about bloated software like Office or Visual Studio. We could even compare the performance difference between old version from the 90s to what people use today. On one end.. I get it. Microsoft are throwing so much "features" at you, whether part of the OS or particular software like Office. If they dont their competitors will. Microsoft "Office" use to be a Desktop Publishing suite which included the likes of Excel, Word, Access, etc. Now, Office is just a category of hundreds of applications accessed via the cloud. To think, whether on Windows bootup, or launching an modern application involves many API calls to something, somewhere in the world. No wonder applications like MS Teams takes 8-20 seconds to load (and that is sometimes being nice!) Considering the specs of my PC.. it should load incredibly fast. Yet, for some reason, I could run something like Visual Studio 6.0 from the late 90s and will load INSTANTLY on a modern machine -- and it will be single threaded! Some may be thinking "but modern Visual Studio has these features I cannot live without!" -- are these excuses why it take so long to LOAD? The problem we have is.. to some degree.. you have a development team who do not care about performance or memory. On the other end, you have a development team that are frustrated because it is outside their control what is considered IMPORTANT. If they speak up it might cost them their job. I will always remember during my College days I had a project which was about doing 3D animations. We had to do a Presentation on our work at the end of the assignment. I think most people spend 50% of their project time on Microsoft Powerpoint. For its day, on the hardware available.. even that was bloat! They were fiddling with their text and images on screen. I was sooo fed up with it I decided to amend my program so it could be used as a presentation slideshow as well. Once added, all I had to do was use a text editor, writing scheme-like code to a file, covering how build each slide and animations. It was running smooth and fast and everyone was asking "how did you get it to look so good" thinking I am doing some cool trick in MS Powerpoint. Nope... just OpenGL in C. Things like Office has always been bulky and slow. The funny thing is -- I bet Microsoft Powerpoint from 1997 would run EXTREMELY fast on todays hardware. At home, I moved away from Microsoft and Windows since 2006-ish trying Ubuntu. I did experiment with Suse Linux before that but once home internet became solid.. so did Linux in my opinion. Sure, I still use Windows as my job requires it... and I can see Microsoft keeping their power/control thanks to cloud/azure and other things. Also, Excel has such as legacy to it that many people in Finance and other dept RELY on Excel! Point is many will stick with Windows because of that. You have Valve helping Linux thrive in the gaming space. We need something that can help Linux thrive in the Office space. I am suprised there is not modern Spreadsheet application that takes us away from Excel. Sadly, you need a full DTP suite.
• RS-232 2y ago
  Maybe I'm an out-of-touch nerd who needs to touch grass, but I would love to see a world where Markdown has supplanted this glorified suite of XML editors. Markdown has docs, slides, tables, diagrams (via Mermaid), and can be read on any system that has a text editor. It's simple, non-proprietary, and future proof. This repo says it all: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
• vendiddy 2y ago
  As a lay person, apps like Office feel like they stay the same between updates and somehow manage to get fatter and slower. (I'm sure they've got some new improvements tucked away but I don't notice them.) Or every time I update my OS it's like a 10GB download. What did I just get for that 10GB? I honestly can't tell. Even my smartphone. Seem often where I'm asked to install a 2GB update aaand it's same as before but slower? Anyone else have this sentiment?
  • alias_neo 2y ago
    A lot of the time, it's underlying libraries and tools that are updated to fix bugs, security vulnerabilities or just because they got a new version. In the case of binaries (the thing you download as an end user; compiled code), even the smallest 1 character change in the source code, can mean you have to download the entire binary again, whether it's a 5kB binary, or a 1GB one. There are patching techniques that can work around this but they're rarely used at a binary level and usually at a "package" or "archive" level. For performance, it's a harder one to answer, because there are potentially many reasons, I have my opinions as a Software Engineer myself, but others will have different opinions. Ultimately, software moves "forward", which can mean more code, more features, more bug fixes (and thus safety checks etc) and potentially worse performance, although _better_ performance is also possible with optimisations. That said, as hardware advances, it enables writing more powerful software with more features, which then become more of a struggle for older hardware to run. From a device manufacturer perspective; they want to sell you new devices, so there's little incentive for them (in my opinion) in spending developer time on trying to optimise new code for older devices.
• oriettaxx 2y ago
  one day we'll be able to estimate the underdevelopment and waste of energy caused from such a bad software, good for me I learned very early to stay far from the whole microshit world: never had any doubt. ...and his head is till pontificating on how the world should run...
• wkat4242 2y ago
  Ehm this is nothing new. They did that decades ago. Edit: Should have known I wouldn't be the first to remember :)
• ErrorNoBrain 2y ago
  Personally i'd prefer just a "lite" version of the main apps, excel, word, powerpoint... i dont need the other programs and ALL of them contain a TON of features i'll never ever use (as a private person, not company of course)
  • smt88 2y ago
    How do the apps know which features you'll use or not? How do they know which features were used in the document you're opening?
• vgb2k18 2y ago
  Edge has been doing this for a very long time, since well-before Windows 11 existed.
• _7acn 2y ago
  I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual). I've been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25 years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their products because they were one of the best companies when it came to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains (ironically, it's a technology they acquired - it used to be Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I actively discourage people from using most of their so-called "products" because the quality is just appallingly low. Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider + LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that have been dragging on for years. There's virtually nothing left of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire. That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren't any better - there's a general trend of maximizing profit while offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100% down the open-source path.
  • smelendez 2y ago
    I use Pages as my default word processor. It doesn’t have all of Word’s features but I seldom need them, and it’s much faster than Word. I highly recommend it.
    • kstrauser 2y ago
      Same. I use Word only to edit Word files that I have to send back to someone outside my company. That's not often for me. Pages is vastly better for every other use case I have.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • 2y ago
• notyourwork 2y ago
  Can anyone with inside information explain why these apps are slow? Why can they not just make startup faster?
  • mdhb 2y ago
    Because they did this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738
• gootz 2y ago
  This is what Linux is for :))
• bsrkf 2y ago
  Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software? I would happily pay for software that was high-quality was fast was privacy preserving had sane defaults had/provided reasonable support/insight (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing models (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc) as in an e-mail client an office suite a scheduler (scheduling learning, tasks, various deadlines, calendar, ...) photo/video editor (wouldn't need to be of the scope of a professional suite) a browser (earnestly, one that wasn't a mere chrome re-skin, wasn't run by a bloated paid by Google organization like Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy seriously) ... or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time developers working how many hours, building on open-source software where sensible (as in you wouldn't hand-roll your own cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries) would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail Client? (there's little in terms of software that I hate more than Outlook) And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such developers, how many 'customers' with fair pricing would such a company/startup need? You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar to Sublime's https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text you could build upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay cuts for if that's what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...) etc... Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn't there still a viable market? Maybe what's left is even more so, given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a significant extent) of power users, semi-professionals/professionals & businesses? And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche bubble, the plights of modern's software lack of quality are real and I'm sure felt beyond us.
  • likium 2y ago
    There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently had an email and calendar client. And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better quality product.
• VoodooJuJu 2y ago
  [dead]
• fatata123 2y ago
  [dead]
• bigmattystyles 2y ago
  What Linux gui was it where you’d be in the desktop, but it was blocked by a modal until all components and startups were done loading? I always preferred that over a slow desktop environment struggling for resources while components were still starting.
• neuroelectron 2y ago
  Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.
  • csdvrx 2y ago
    I use both: they are extremely fast - faster than Wordpad (on a native windows installation), much faster than libreoffice (on linux with wine).
• randomNumber7 2y ago
  Windows is too slow at startup, so microsoft boots it up before you buy it.
• SCdF 2y ago
  Doesn't Windows already precache frequently started binaries (and I presume the data that binary loads at startup)? Or was that a different operating system?
• tonyhart7 2y ago
  ok but can they just optimize that to the ground or they just get fcked with backward compability and tech debt????
• smithkl42 2y ago
  I made the observation back in the 90's that Word will always take several seconds to load. Any longer and it becomes too painful, so Microsoft will figure out a way to fix it. Any shorter and it just means that there are more bloated features that Microsoft can stuff into it.
• daft_pink 2y ago
  I just wish they didn’t shove onedrive down your throat.
• sunshine-o 2y ago
  The harm that Microsoft and Office has done to global productivity over the last decades is unquantifiable at this point.
• zelphirkalt 2y ago
  That is just the kind of duct tape, that they would come up with, instead of fixing the underlying issues. To be fair, probably by now the Office mess is unfixable in any sensible time frame, without a massive effort. And since offline/local Office is not a priority for MS at all, they are probably not willing to invest the resources, and continue to sell shitty software.
• n8m8 2y ago
  That's it, I'm switching to linux for real this time
• bk496 2y ago
  Can they do this for vscode?
• jacurtis 2y ago
  I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender. Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I boot up a Microsoft Office product I have a 33% chance that it crashes. How can I build an AI model with no issue, find and replace instantly in an IDE for a projects that is tens of gigabytes and thousands of files with no issue. But I want to write a sentance onto a blank page in Microsoft Word, or Reply "thanks" to an email in Microsoft Outlook and the application crashes or takes 3 minutes to load? I truly do not understand how Microsoft Office is still the dominant enterprise platform. These applications have horrible UIs, they are bloated, slow, and expensive. Yet every IT department foams at the mouth and gets a hard-on to sign their Microsoft 365 contract for $200 per user.
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    The customer is not the user for Microsoft products.
  • kuekacang 2y ago
    It seems like it would be more stable to run windows office under wine instead.
  • noname120 2y ago
    Outlook and the office suite hardly ever crash on my up-to-date MacBook Pro M2 with no company MDM crapware. Are you sure it's not your company's bs that causes the crashes?
  • not_a_bot_4sho 2y ago
    > Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I'd bet on this being the cause before Office itself
• johnklos 2y ago
  Imagine explaining this to someome in 1995: "In thirty years our computers will have sixteen threads of execution at 4.5 GHz each, with 4 IPC or better, along with 16 gigabytes of memory that can move data at 50 gigabytes a second. Practically everyone will have solid state storage that loads and saves at more than a gigabyte per second. Many computers will have GPUs capable of beating the fastest supercomputers in the 1995 world, and most of that capacity will be used for little more than just pushing pixels to a monitor." "Wow! I bet Microsoft Word will load instantly!" "No. It'll take longer to load than Word 5.1 takes to load on an Amiga with an '060 accelerator running ShapeShifter. It'll be so slow that Microsoft decides to load key parts of Office when the system boots, but only if you have more RAM than can be directly accessed by a 32 bit processor." It's something you'd expect from a snarky article from The Register or from me, if you know me, but I think both El Reg and I wouldn't've quite gotten the full extent of it.
  • riskable 2y ago
    Fast forward ten years from NOW: * Windows itself takes 10 minutes to boot because it's preloading a hundred Office libraries/extensions like Mac OS 7. * Microsoft Office apps have returned to being incredibly slow to open—because they decided that the added speed of preloading just gave them more leeway to add bloat. * Microsoft has acquired several AI startups that use different models and provide several high-RAM, GPU-hogging apps. To work around the slowness they have worked with hardware vendors to include multiple GPUs on each actual GPU card. They don't communicate directly with each other though... That feature is only enabled for the "Enterprise" series of GPUs that cost $50,000 each. * Microsoft Office now automatically use AI prediction for everything. Including the data (not just the formulas) in your Excel spreadsheets. But it gets it wrong so often that people wish they could turn that feature off. They can't, though, because they didn't pay for the "Enterprise" version of Windows or Office (have to have both in order to truly disable the AI). * AI is now actively watching all inbound and outbound traffic on every PC, increasing base latency a hundredfold. Microsoft claims this allows them to catch viruses, scammers, and bad state actors faster.
• libraryatnight 2y ago
  Dude, the only thing keeping me on Windows is Ableton. Can one of you super hackers go get a job there and port Ableton to Linux, plase? (it's not great through Wine) I'd go with bitwig but I have a push device and it's super cool. Tauntingly, Push runs a Linux Ableton variant in standalone mode, I've read. They're mocking me. I'm so sick of Windows.When Elon took over twitter and you stopped being able to say anything, I was banned because I told Microsoft I hate them and I hope they burn - I'd just received an update that forced some bullshit on me and it inconvenienced my personal and work life, I felt they needed told they suck. I don't miss twitter at all, I still hope Microsoft burns.
• scioto 2y ago
  My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me. I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux. I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.
  • riskable 2y ago
    I love that you've got something like, "upgrade to Linux" in your calendar :) However, I recommend at least testing it on your hardware before that date. Put Ventoy on a USB drive and play with some live distros. Just to make sure everything works the way you expect. You never know, you may have that one piece of hardware that doesn't work :shrug:
    • sota_pop 2y ago
      FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be officially dropping support for Win10.
  • Wingy 2y ago
    If you make your Windows 11 USB with Rufus you can disable the TPM 2.0 and other hardware requirement checks. You totally should try a Linux install first though!
  • scblock 2y ago
    FYI "the few games that work" is most of them these days, including newer games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring and older ridiculous towers of cards like my heavily modded Skyrim setup. I think it's mostly things that use invasive anti-cheat software that struggle. I use a mix of Steam and Heroic Games Launcher and haven't run into anything I've been playing recently that doesn't work except my PSVR2 to PC adapter in Steam, which I haven't taken any time to troubleshoot.
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  Electron? Isn't Microsoft migrating all of their Office apps over to WebView2 (their version of Electron). If so, I wonder how much of this is related to that than anything else?
• _ah 2y ago
  Wow, this takes me back. I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster. That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is actually the reason everything is worse, and it's even more challenging when there's no direct impact- just a broad increase in system memory pressure. Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.
  • nikanj 2y ago
    And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V
    • calf 2y ago
      Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?
      • nikanj 2y ago
        He wrote that in 1974. Software products were orders of magnitude smaller back then.
    • majkinetor 2y ago
      I guess he was thinking that u might not need Saturn V. If u later decide based on more info that u need it, drop the old work and make perfy version from 0. I yhink that is reasonable given how much more work and resources it requires
    • godelski 2y ago
• rozab 2y ago
  This is a fascinating contrast to Raymond Chen's recent blog post about adding seconds to the taskbar clock[0]. Apparently there is some energy efficiency team at Microsoft which in some cases is so strict it blocked this feature for decades. But at the same time... things like this are allowed to happen. Something about Conway's law perhaps? [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=111095 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...
• jjcm 2y ago
  To me the craziest thing about this is that often times web apps with the same functionality feel leagues faster to load, with nearly equivalent functionality. Google docs/google sheets/notion/coda all load faster than the native MS Word / Excel. Photopea is another example - it clones out the main user paths of Photoshop and loads in a 1/10th of the time. I really don't understand it.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  That's funny. My Emacs config does the opposite. It defers loading stuff until you need it to speed up initially load time.
• jimt1234 2y ago
  Here's a crazy idea: Make software that isn't bloated with features that 90% of customers don't actually use.
• josephernest 2y ago
  I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.
• rochak 2y ago
  I don't know what is going on at Microsoft but words can't express how fast their ecosystem has been going down the gutter. At this point, I do not recommend Microsoft's products if a good enough alternative exists (many times it does).
• pete1302 2y ago
  What the hell Bruv........
• m-p-3 2y ago
  So instead of rounds of optimizations, it bogs down everything else..
• DLA 2y ago
  Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I’m good.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• arkensaw 2y ago
  I have an old copy of office 2003 I still use, it's lightning quick on even ten year old hardware. It literally starts in under 1 second. It needs a plugin to open and save docx but it works well. I don't know if there's some fantastic functionality I'm missing out on but it works fine for me.
• giroro 2y ago
  Microsoft does not put it's good programmers on its consumer-grade products, because Microsoft does not respect it's consumers. Microsoft puts its real talent on its customer-grade products, like Azure and SaaS. That's where they make real money, so that's where they send real talent. The only exception right now might be copilot, which will never make money... But they say that's where they're putting their best and brightest. Then again, they're probably spending billions of CPU hours to generate millions of unique disclaimers and pleasantries - when they could instead use a simple look up table to efficiently weed-out the most common/worthless prompts. That isn't the big-brain design innovation that you'd normally expect from top talent. It's not even baseline acceptable from anybody who actually knows the first thing about how computers work, really. They would rather spend 10 billion dollars on a single computer than to prioritize optimization. Its weird. But do you want an electronics engineer who understands "instructions", "addresses", "registers", "clocks" and even knows why a pointer works? Or do you want a modern CS major who can use a template to quickly crank out non-scalable apps in a software factory? These skills are mutually exclusive.
• jug 2y ago
  Edge also does this, as in not just web rendering for those parts of Windows using WebView2, but Edge itself. You can supposedly disable it in Edge -> Settings -> System and Performance -> Disable Quick Start
• quantum_state 2y ago
  It is a wrong thing to do ... soon .. no one would want to use Windows ....
• Animats 2y ago
  Java distros once came with a thing that exercised Java once a minute or so to keep it in memory. I found this running on a milling machine's control PC, and I was seriously annoyed.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• low_tech_punk 2y ago
  It's time for some severance at the office
• pjfin123 2y ago
  LibreOffice is still fast to start
• ZunarJ5 2y ago
  I don't want it to load at startup.
• HackerThemAll 1y ago
  The solution could be to rewrite some parts in Electron, Node and/or other JavaScript-based junk, with millions of files and dirs in node_modules. That would surely improve performance. Electron developers still cannot use ZIP/7z for storing their crap to save space and make loading faster. They invented their own ASAR which they also don't use. The amount of node_modules crap only increases what is in line with ever-increasing entropy.