7 ms·

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, b

by tjader 1y ago

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff. I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.
- vel0city 1y ago
  Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider. And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
  - tjader 1y ago
    But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place? And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here. And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the click six hours later, wouldn't people then complain about how obviously bloated it was? How is this not a constant battle of being unable to appease any critics until we're back at the Win 3.1 state of things with no Bluetooth devices, no WiFi networks, no dynamic changing or audio devices, etc? And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.
      - tjader 1y ago
        > And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without having to wait one second even if the button is not enabled yet, and by the time my mouse reaches it it will probably be enabled. > And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features. I've never seen the volume slider in Windows 98 take one second to render. Not even the start menu, which is much more complex, and which in Windows 11 often takes a second, and search results also show up after a random amount of time and shuffle the results around a few times, leading to many misclicks.
        vel0city 1y ago
        It doesn't even know if the devices are still attached (as it potentially hasn't tried interfacing them for hours) but should instantly be able to allow input to control them and fully understand their current status. Right. Makes sense. And if you don't remember the volume slider taking several seconds to render on XP you must be much wealthier than me or have some extremely rose colored glasses. I play around with old hardware all the time and get frustrated with the unresponsiveness of old equipment with period accurate software, and had a lot of decent hardware (to me at least) in the 90s and 00s. I've definitely experienced lots of times of the start menu painting one entry after the other at launch, taking a second to roll out, seeking on disk for that third level menu in 98, etc. Rose colored glasses, the lot of you. Go use an old 386 for a month. Tell me how much more productive you are after.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    For a more balanced comparison, observe how long it takes for the new "Settings" app to open and how long interactions take, compared to Control Panel, and what's missing from the former that the latter has had for literally decades.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I'm far faster changing my default audio device with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Sound > Right click audio device > Set as Default. Now I just click the quick settings > the little sound device icon > chosoe a device. I'm far faster changing my WiFi network with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center (if using Vista or newer) > Network Devices > right click network adapter > Connect / Disconnect > go through Wizard process to set up new network. Now I just click the quick settings, click the little arrow to list WiFi networks, choose the network, click connect. Way faster. I'm also generally far faster finding whatever setting in the Settings menu over trying to figure out which tab on which little Control Panel widget some obscure setting is, because there's a useful search box that will pull up practically any setting these days. Sure, maybe if you had every setting in Control Panel memorized you could be faster, but I'm far faster just searching for the setting I'm looking for at the moment for anything I'm not regularly changing. The new Settings area, now that it actually has most things, is generally a far better experience unless you had everything in Control Panel committed to muscle memory. I do acknowledge though there are still a few things that aren't as good, but I imagine they'll get better. For most things most users actually mess with on a regular basis, it seems to me the Settings app is better than Control Panel. The only thing that really frustrates me with Settings now on a regular basis is only being able to have one instance of the app open at a time, a dumb limitation. Every time I'm needing to mess with something in ancient versions of Windows these days is now a pain despite me growing up with it. So many things nested in non-obvious areas, things hidden behind tab after tab of settings and menus. Right click that, go to properties, click that, go to properties on that, click that button, go to the Options tab, click Configure, and there you go that's where you set that value. Easy! Versus typing something like the setting you want to set into the search box in Settings and have it take you right to that setting.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Honestly it behaves like the interface is some Electron app that has to load the visual elements from a little internal webserver. That would be a very silly way to build an OS UI though, so I don't know what Microsoft is doing.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  XP had gray boxes and laggy menus like you wouldn't believe. It didn't even do search in the start menu, and maybe that was for the best because even on an SSD its search functionality was dog slow. A clean XP install in a VM for nostalgia's sake is fine, but XP as actually used by people for a while quickly ground to a halt because of all the third party software you needed. The task bar was full of battery widgets, power management icons, tray icons for integrated drivers, and probably at least two WiFi icons, and maybe two Bluetooth ones as well. All of them used different menus that are slow in their own respect, despite being a 200KiB executable that looks like it was written in 1995. And the random crashes, there were so many random crashes. Driver programmes for basic features crashed all the time. Keeping XP running for more than a day or two by using sleep mode was a surefire way to get an unusual OS. Modern Windows has its issues but the olden days weren't all that great, we just tolerated more bullshit.
RajT88 1y ago
This one drives me nuts. I have to stay connected to VPN to work, and if I see VPN is not connected I click to reconnect. If the VPN button hasn't loaded you end up turning on Airplane mode. Ouch.
buzzerbetrayed 1y ago
Yep. I suspect GP has just gotten used to this and it is the new “snappy” to them. I see this all the time with people who have old computers. “My computer is really fast. I have no need to upgrade” I press cmd+tab and watch it take 5 seconds to switch to the next window. That’s a real life interaction I had with my parents in the past month. People just don’t know what they’re missing out on if they aren’t using it daily.
- vel0city 1y ago
  Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow. Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets its so incredibly slow. I still remember trying to do photo editing on a Pentium II with a massive 64MB of RAM. Or trying to get decent resolutions scans off a scanner with a Pentium III and 128MB of RAM.
  - titzer 1y ago
    64MB is about the size of (a big) L3 cache. Today's L3 caches have a latency of 3-12ns and throughput measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second. And yet we can't manage to get responsive UIs because of tons of crud.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      My modern machine running a modern OS is still way snappier while actually loading the machine and doing stuff. Sure, if I'm directly on a tty and just running vim on a small file its super fast. The same on my modern machine. Try doing a few things at once or handle some large dataset and see how well it goes. My older computers would completely lock up when given a large task to do, often for many seconds. Scanning an image would take over the whole machine for like a minute per page! Applying a filter to an image would lock up the machine for several seconds even for a much smaller image a much simpler filter. The computer cannot even play mp3's and have a responsive word processor, if you really want to listen to music while writing a paper you better have it pass through the audio from a CD, much less think about streaming it from some remote location and have a whole encrypted TCP stream and decompression. These days I can have lots of large tasks running at the same time and still have more responsiveness. I have fun playing around with retro hardware and old applications, but "fast" and "responsive" are not adjectives I'd use to describe them.
mike_hearn 1y ago
Windows 11 shell partly uses React Native in the start button flyout. It's not a heavily optimized codebase.
- tjader 1y ago
  That's the point. It's so bloated that an entirely local operation that should be instantaneous takes over 1 second.
- userbinator 1y ago
  No, it's a heavily pessimized codebase.

by tjader 1y ago

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff. I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.

vel0city 1y ago
Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider. And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
- tjader 1y ago
  But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place? And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here. And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the click six hours later, wouldn't people then complain about how obviously bloated it was? How is this not a constant battle of being unable to appease any critics until we're back at the Win 3.1 state of things with no Bluetooth devices, no WiFi networks, no dynamic changing or audio devices, etc? And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.
    - tjader 1y ago
      > And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without having to wait one second even if the button is not enabled yet, and by the time my mouse reaches it it will probably be enabled. > And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features. I've never seen the volume slider in Windows 98 take one second to render. Not even the start menu, which is much more complex, and which in Windows 11 often takes a second, and search results also show up after a random amount of time and shuffle the results around a few times, leading to many misclicks.
      - vel0city 1y ago
        It doesn't even know if the devices are still attached (as it potentially hasn't tried interfacing them for hours) but should instantly be able to allow input to control them and fully understand their current status. Right. Makes sense. And if you don't remember the volume slider taking several seconds to render on XP you must be much wealthier than me or have some extremely rose colored glasses. I play around with old hardware all the time and get frustrated with the unresponsiveness of old equipment with period accurate software, and had a lot of decent hardware (to me at least) in the 90s and 00s. I've definitely experienced lots of times of the start menu painting one entry after the other at launch, taking a second to roll out, seeking on disk for that third level menu in 98, etc. Rose colored glasses, the lot of you. Go use an old 386 for a month. Tell me how much more productive you are after.
- userbinator 1y ago
  For a more balanced comparison, observe how long it takes for the new "Settings" app to open and how long interactions take, compared to Control Panel, and what's missing from the former that the latter has had for literally decades.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I'm far faster changing my default audio device with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Sound > Right click audio device > Set as Default. Now I just click the quick settings > the little sound device icon > chosoe a device. I'm far faster changing my WiFi network with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center (if using Vista or newer) > Network Devices > right click network adapter > Connect / Disconnect > go through Wizard process to set up new network. Now I just click the quick settings, click the little arrow to list WiFi networks, choose the network, click connect. Way faster. I'm also generally far faster finding whatever setting in the Settings menu over trying to figure out which tab on which little Control Panel widget some obscure setting is, because there's a useful search box that will pull up practically any setting these days. Sure, maybe if you had every setting in Control Panel memorized you could be faster, but I'm far faster just searching for the setting I'm looking for at the moment for anything I'm not regularly changing. The new Settings area, now that it actually has most things, is generally a far better experience unless you had everything in Control Panel committed to muscle memory. I do acknowledge though there are still a few things that aren't as good, but I imagine they'll get better. For most things most users actually mess with on a regular basis, it seems to me the Settings app is better than Control Panel. The only thing that really frustrates me with Settings now on a regular basis is only being able to have one instance of the app open at a time, a dumb limitation. Every time I'm needing to mess with something in ancient versions of Windows these days is now a pain despite me growing up with it. So many things nested in non-obvious areas, things hidden behind tab after tab of settings and menus. Right click that, go to properties, click that, go to properties on that, click that button, go to the Options tab, click Configure, and there you go that's where you set that value. Easy! Versus typing something like the setting you want to set into the search box in Settings and have it take you right to that setting.
jandrese 1y ago
Honestly it behaves like the interface is some Electron app that has to load the visual elements from a little internal webserver. That would be a very silly way to build an OS UI though, so I don't know what Microsoft is doing.
jeroenhd 1y ago
XP had gray boxes and laggy menus like you wouldn't believe. It didn't even do search in the start menu, and maybe that was for the best because even on an SSD its search functionality was dog slow. A clean XP install in a VM for nostalgia's sake is fine, but XP as actually used by people for a while quickly ground to a halt because of all the third party software you needed. The task bar was full of battery widgets, power management icons, tray icons for integrated drivers, and probably at least two WiFi icons, and maybe two Bluetooth ones as well. All of them used different menus that are slow in their own respect, despite being a 200KiB executable that looks like it was written in 1995. And the random crashes, there were so many random crashes. Driver programmes for basic features crashed all the time. Keeping XP running for more than a day or two by using sleep mode was a surefire way to get an unusual OS. Modern Windows has its issues but the olden days weren't all that great, we just tolerated more bullshit.

RajT88 1y ago

This one drives me nuts. I have to stay connected to VPN to work, and if I see VPN is not connected I click to reconnect. If the VPN button hasn't loaded you end up turning on Airplane mode. Ouch.

buzzerbetrayed 1y ago

Yep. I suspect GP has just gotten used to this and it is the new “snappy” to them. I see this all the time with people who have old computers. “My computer is really fast. I have no need to upgrade” I press cmd+tab and watch it take 5 seconds to switch to the next window. That’s a real life interaction I had with my parents in the past month. People just don’t know what they’re missing out on if they aren’t using it daily.

vel0city 1y ago
Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow. Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets its so incredibly slow. I still remember trying to do photo editing on a Pentium II with a massive 64MB of RAM. Or trying to get decent resolutions scans off a scanner with a Pentium III and 128MB of RAM.
- titzer 1y ago
  64MB is about the size of (a big) L3 cache. Today's L3 caches have a latency of 3-12ns and throughput measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second. And yet we can't manage to get responsive UIs because of tons of crud.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    My modern machine running a modern OS is still way snappier while actually loading the machine and doing stuff. Sure, if I'm directly on a tty and just running vim on a small file its super fast. The same on my modern machine. Try doing a few things at once or handle some large dataset and see how well it goes. My older computers would completely lock up when given a large task to do, often for many seconds. Scanning an image would take over the whole machine for like a minute per page! Applying a filter to an image would lock up the machine for several seconds even for a much smaller image a much simpler filter. The computer cannot even play mp3's and have a responsive word processor, if you really want to listen to music while writing a paper you better have it pass through the audio from a CD, much less think about streaming it from some remote location and have a whole encrypted TCP stream and decompression. These days I can have lots of large tasks running at the same time and still have more responsiveness. I have fun playing around with retro hardware and old applications, but "fast" and "responsive" are not adjectives I'd use to describe them.

mike_hearn 1y ago

Windows 11 shell partly uses React Native in the start button flyout. It's not a heavily optimized codebase.

tjader 1y ago
That's the point. It's so bloated that an entirely local operation that should be instantaneous takes over 1 second.
userbinator 1y ago
No, it's a heavily pessimized codebase.