4 ms·

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 1y 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 1y ago
[deleted]
michaelt 1y 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 1y ago
  Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.
  - SauciestGNU 1y ago
    Consult a physician if your web app displays a throbber for longer than four hours.
- snkzxbs 1y ago
  Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.
  - o11c 1y 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.
    - windward 1y ago
      LibreOffice also sucks in this regard. 'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet' I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
      - mcv 1y ago
        I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.
coherentpony 1y ago
It shouldn't be "an idea" at all. Profile the application, find the hotspots, understand what the performance limiter is, and fix it. Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the right thing to do.
mike_hearn 1y ago
It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade secret until many years later, I think. Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature. Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware. This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
- p_ing 1y ago
  The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from. https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_KB_Archive/165071 https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K... > The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.

DaiPlusPlus 1y 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 1y ago

[deleted]

michaelt 1y 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 1y ago
Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.
- SauciestGNU 1y ago
  Consult a physician if your web app displays a throbber for longer than four hours.
snkzxbs 1y ago
Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.
- o11c 1y 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.
  - windward 1y ago
    LibreOffice also sucks in this regard. 'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet' I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
    - mcv 1y ago
      I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.

coherentpony 1y ago

It shouldn't be "an idea" at all. Profile the application, find the hotspots, understand what the performance limiter is, and fix it. Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the right thing to do.

mike_hearn 1y ago

It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade secret until many years later, I think. Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature. Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware. This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.

p_ing 1y ago
The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from. https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_KB_Archive/165071 https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K... > The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.