[tjader]

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_]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[ndriscoll]

Rendering a volume slider or some icons shouldn't take half a second, regardless. e.g. speaking of Carmack, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory hits a consistent 333 FPS (the max the limiter allows) on my 9 year old computer. That's 3 ms/full frame for a 3d shooter that's doing considerably more work than a vector wifi icon.

Also, you could keep the status accurate because it only needs to update on change events anyway, events that happen on "human time" (e.g. you plugged in headphones or moved to a new network location) last for a practical eternity in computer time, and your pre-loaded icon probably takes a couple kB of memory.

It seems absurd to me that almost any UI should fail to hit your monitor's refresh rate as its limiting factor in responsiveness. The only things that make sense for my computer to show its age are photo and video editing with 50 MB RAW photos and 120 MB/s (bytes, not bits) video off my camera.

[vel0city]

It's not the drawing an icon to a screen that takes the half second, it's querying out to hardware on driver stacks designed for PCI WiFi adapters from the XP era along with all the other driver statuses.

It's like how Wi-Fi drivers would cause lag from querying their status, lots of poorly designed drivers and archaic frameworks for them to plug in.

And I doubt any hardware you had when Wolfenstein:ET came out rendered the game that fast. I remember it running at less than 60fps back in '03 on my computer. So slow, poorly optimized, I get better frame rates in Half Life. Why would anyone write something so buggy, unoptimized, and slow?!

[tjader]

> 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]

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.

[dleink]

You hit on something there, I could type faster than my 2400 baud connection but barring a bad connection those connections were pretty reliable.

[userbinator]

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]

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.

[jeroenhd]

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.

[jandrese]

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.

[buzzerbetrayed]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[dijit]

I struggle because everything you're saying is your subjective truth, and mine differs.

Aside from the seminal discussion about text input latency from Dan Luu[0] there's very little we can do to disprove anything right now.

Back in the day asking my computer to "do" something was the thing I always dreaded, I could navigate, click around, use chat programs like IRC/ICQ and so on, and everything was fine, until I opened a program or "did" something that caused the computer to think.

Now it feels like there's no distinction between using a computer and asking it to do something heavy. The fact that I can't hear the harddisk screaming or the fan spin up (and have it be tied to something I asked the computer to do) might be related.

It becomes expectation management at some point, and nominally a "faster computer" in those days meant that those times I asked the computer to do something the computer would finish it's work quicker. Now it's much more about how responsive the machine will be... for a while, until it magically slows down over time again.

[0]: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

[vel0city]

> Back in the day asking my computer to "do" something was the thing I always dreaded, I could navigate, click around, use chat programs like IRC/ICQ and so on, and everything was fine, until I opened a program or "did" something that caused the computer to think.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. When I'm actually using my computer, its orders of magnitude faster. Things where I'd do one click and then practically have to walk away and come back to see if it worked happen in 100ms now. This is the machine being way faster and far more responsive.

Like, OK, some Apple IIe had 30ms latency on a key press compared to 50ms on a Haswell desktop with a decent refresh rate screen or 100ms on some Thinkpad from 2017, assuming these machines aren't doing anything.

But I'm not usually doing nothing when I want to press the key. I've got dozens of other things I want my computer to do. I want it listening for events on a few different chat clients. I want it to have several dozen web pages open. I want it to stream music. I want it to have several different code editors open with linters examining my code. I want it paying attention if I get new mail. I want it syncing directories from this machine to other machines and cloud storage. I want numerous background agents handling tons of different things. Any one of those tasks would cause that Apple IIe to crawl instantly and it doesn't even have the memory to render a tiny corner of my screen.

The computer is orders of magnitude "faster", in that it is doing many times as much work much faster even when it's seemingly just sitting there. Because that's what we expect from our computers these days.

Tell me how fast a button press is when you're on a video call on your Apple IIe while having a code linter run while driving a 4K panel and multiple virtual desktops. How's its Unicode support?

[kristianp]

The newish windows photo viewer in Win 10 is painfully slow and it renders a lower res preview first, but then the photo seems to move when the full resolution is shown. The photo viewer in windows 7 would prerender the next photo so the transition to the next one would be instant. The is for 24 megapixel photos, maybe 4mb jpegs.

So the quality has gone backwards in the process of rewriting the app into the touch friendly style. A lot of core windows apps are like that.

Note that the windows file system is much slower than the linux etx4, I don't know about Mac filesystems.

[RajT88]

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.

[mike_hearn]

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

[tjader]

That's the point. It's so bloated that an entirely local operation that should be instantaneous takes over 1 second.

[userbinator]

No, it's a heavily pessimized codebase.