Are we sure they did it on purpose? At this point I can totally see Microsoft improving Windows being totally accidental.
Sorry we intended to put in more ads.
I don’t know any company named Microsoft. Do you mean Microslop?
What? How is this new? I’ve had web results disabled via the settings for a while now
They need a simple toggle for it, honestly.
Only bad management is keeping everything from being crazy fast. No reason for today’s programs to be slower than what we had a decade ago.
There’s also a whole lot of abstraction layers in software these days. All kinds of frameworks, no code platforms, scripts and engines ask introduce their own delays when running software, all added to make time to market a bit shorter or just because of some tech fetish.
Lol, “the C Programming language is an abstraction of assembly and I for one, won’t have it!”
Some of those frameworks and no code platform bloat are because of that. Most are there to make working on large multi team software projects feasible.
It’s not the first time one team makes a module with an API. The other team needs a few lines of data from that module but the filter in the API is bad, so just retrieve millions of rows and apply your own filter to get the two rows. There is no event trigger, so keep polling those two lines every second. Multiply with dozens of modules and a bunch of politics that refuse to make changes and you get a very sluggish application.
Sure yeah, this stuff happens all the time, and often persists until people start noticing the application being sluggish and they go and investigate and fix the slow points.
Alternatively you have tightly integrated software that only one team can work on and it takes years to come out and every time a feature needs to change its another 6 month job of reworking everything, and debugging and fixing security issues is a nightmare.
In most systems, not just computers, there’s a tradeoff between a highly integrated and high performance design, vs a modularized loosely coupled one that’s more adaptable and resilient.
Just look at automotives, Teslas have a unibody design that makes them cheap to build and low weight, that also makes them enormously expensive to repair and impossible to find aftermarket parts for.
Choosing maximally integrated is rarely the best path, there is always a middle ground, and one important difference between the paths is that it’s usually easier to go from modular to integrated than vice versa.
Windows OS updates and releases aren’t subject to this as it’s closed source
Whether human or machine, external factors are all internally decided
Why do you assume this can’t be an issue in a closed source?
Describe the abstraction layers of a closed source project in the context of Microsoft
You can’t, unless you work for Microsoft
There’s market forces, which is not what you described; rather tooling and nuance specific to software development
When Microsoft controls the input and outputs, it’s a closed loop affected by Microsoft governance, not random tools, systems or transparent inputs
I’m a software engineer at a large company you may not have heard of, but you almost certainly know at least one of their brands. Abstraction layers are all over the place; they’re not a symptom of open-source software, they’re a symptom of lots of modern software.
How do external factors affect closed source systems, when the entire lifecycle is governed by Microsoft
Because even closed source systems don’t exist in a vacuum?!
.Net
Ah yes, the open source dotnet as an example of closed source abstractions
You wanted an abstraction layer, I provided one.
I remember when finishing my dissertation and thinking about how my sister did her one several years before me, in a computer that was considered unusable by the time I did mine, and both the work process and the finished result were pretty much the same. I had a computer that was astronomically better than she had, yet, everything was slow, just like she felt when she did her.
The CPU in an average consumer PC can do tens of billions of instructions per second now. 10,000,000,000+ instructions per second. And then it can also offload some work to other devices. Here, graphics card, deal with updating this display at 144Hz. Hey network card, take this buffer and squirt it out the ethernet port at a 1 gigabit line speed for me.
And even with all that help, it still takes for-fucking-ever to get shit done. What the fuck are all those instructions doing‽
Mine are all used up to block ads and trackers and page elements, then when they’re done, I’m being throttled punitively by the service because i didn’t watch their ads :(
I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running ‘fast’ but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don’t see it getting better. It’s basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.
A computer from the 80’s starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.
That’s nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.
Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.
Because they didn’t load absolutely anything.
I guess most people here are too young to remember that even drivers were loaded at a per program basis, e.g. you would need to configure each game you played to use specific video and audio hardware. Nowadays that doesn’t happen.
Pretty much, though my 486 is configured for ‘94/‘95 timeframe so it loads mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers, Sound Blaster drivers, a Plug’n Play setup, and a couple other things before it shows the prompt, or in this case the menu I scripted.
You realize most computers in the 80’s instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I’m sorry, are you fairly young?
Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.
So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.
Except they did instantly boot. I didn’t say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.
It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.
Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?
Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can’t do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.
Anecdotes ≠ proof
Here is a 486 taking over three minutes to boot.
The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.
well now see, if it had a math coprocessor… blah blah haha
Cool. My phone takes four.
Once again, that’s a single video of one example of an old computer booting up. It’s hardly irrefutable, like anything anecdotal. I’m not even disagreeing on the consensus of newer computers being undeniably faster, this is just a flimsy evidence regardless.
And frankly I don’t care about “contributing” as you describe it. That just amounts to adhering to everyone’s idea of contribution on social media, and I’m not Sisyphus, so…
I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.
When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.
My dad had a C64 that I’d play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.
Linux does this too. GNOME and KDE both do web searches from the search menu by default (to be more precise they search the app store, which is on the web)
Yeah, but at least in KDE, when I search for something that it can’t find on the PC, it gives you the option to “search blah with duckduckgo in firefox” instead of starting a web search immediately, waiting for it to finish, and showing the results in your start menu in front of whatever you actually wanted to find on your PC. It’s the fallback and not the default.
Cool, now do that five years ago
Cool, now bring back windows 7
ive been trying to get windows 7 running on a modern laptop for, like, wayy too long now lol. haven’t had much luck yet. the reason is, i think it’d be neat.
is it ripgrep level of “crazy fast” tho?
It’s far faster. Ripgrep has to search every file exhaustively at query time. Windows Search indexes every file at write time (or a background job) so the search results are near instantaneous … at least, that’s how it used to work. I don’t know what happened to it over the past 5-10 years.
Why can’t ripgrep? “Everything” search does this. https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
Everything could do this but sometimes you don’t want to.
i.e. you’re trading off the background indexing resource usage for instant search results. On a consumer PC where you’re constantly on it and searching for stuff that’s worth it, on a remote server that you’re logging into to bug fix but is normally just running a headless application it may not be.
NTFS drives have an index built-in. It’s not fit for search, but it comes with a journal and you can update a search index incrementally. That’s what Voidtools Everything does. It’s very fast and doesn’t need a background index. (I assume modern Linux drive formats can do the same)
We all know the answer to this.
I would argue it used to be faster since it was indexed.
Not going to install win 11 to find out if it’s any good again. But in 7 it was.
too little, too late
Oh, is it fast?.. I doubt it. Still background services sucking up all the ram.
background services sucking up all the ram.
I love how the (mandated) Teams running on the (mandated) win11 work laptop is gobbling A GIGABYTE AND A HALF OF RAM all by itself. What the actual flapping fuck is that?
Teams, like a lot of MS products, uses Edge Webview 2 (an Electron clone). So if you have Teams, and VS Code, and Chrome or Edge running you are running 3 Chromium instances.
Ew. But, at they all statically linked and can’t share pages for libs in memory? They’re all boating their own space without any kind of sharing? Pardon me and how dumb I am about windows, as I’m intentionally just a reluctant pedestrian on it since 3.1 .
Chromium is pretty much its own operating system, you might as well be running a Linux VM every time you open an instance of Chromium and it is just as sandboxed as any other VM would be so there is no sharing at all.
on top of that, I’m pretty sure electron apps in the background can’t be moved from RAM to Pagefile when they’ve been idle for a while . . . id imagine edge webview likely works the same
Disabling start up items with system config helps.
“We’ve listened to customer feedback and started putting REAL tomatoes into our Shitburger again. People will come flocking back in DROVES!”
irs remind me teh atrocious active desktop on win98. wen you DARED turn it on hooo buy the pc was slow.
I liked it 😂
It had a few good (or at least interesting) ideas for the time.
Also LOTS of bugs.
I have done this (or had this done by IT) on every Windows 10/11 machine that I have had to use. There has long been a registry tweak to kill the online search and it really does improve the experience.
Please share the tweak
That’s like them deliberately closing a strait (for profit), and then reopening it to much glory to their very achievement.
And they didn’t even debloat telemetry, they just turned off the ads.
Also what local search these days isn’t close to instant (which I would say it’s faster than “crazy fast”)?
Are there programs for Windows/Mac or Linux that make search of everything quick and instant? I can’t think of any that don’t involve pre-indexing or massively fail to find what you are looking for (or are slow).
Oh, … I got caught not reading the article, but I assume that goes for Microsoft as well - they do use indexing, right? Have since ever (but in those days you had to manually enable indexing, bcs slow HDDs at the time really bottlenecked)?
By “instant” I meant for indexed content (including installed things, etc). Idk, I don’t search much locally, but if I need a txt file from Documents that how I get it (Linux tho).
Doesn’t Spotlight on Macs work the same-ish or did they enshitify that too?
Edit: The article only says that they turned off Bing results (and added a toggle for the store)? That’s just how Windows users using O&O experienced search this whole time, right?
I don’t immediately see how this is different to eg KDE search functionality (also with added cools that I can do it in desktop, not having to click the search/start before).
is it ripgrep level of “crazy fast” tho?
Not surprising. Web search from the Start Menu was always a bad idea.
Hell, I’ve had to deal with users getting their systems compromised because of this idiocy. User typed ‘ms teams’ in the start menu, clicked on the first link and ended up at an attacker’s page which mimicked the official Teams download page. User clicked “Download”, received the trojaned .msi file and ran it.
Sure, there’s some blame to go around in that case (and we finally got some default configuration changes out of it), but the fact that Microslop’s greed led to a malvertising link showing up in a user’s Start Menu is indicative of everything wrong with Windows 11.
User clicked “Download”, received the trojaned .msi file and ran it.
