[simulator5g]

No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.

[gamblor956]

I just tried to open the context menu in Windows Explorer. It showed up almost as soon as I released the mouse button, and I have a much slower CPU, older video card, and way less RAM then you do. I was also running 12 windows of Firefox with collectively 1000+ tabs (though only about 36 or loaded), Steam, a Unity game, and Microsoft Teams, plus a number of background programs.

If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.

[thebruce87m]

There must be something wrong with quite a lot of hardware then. My windows laptop at work took > 20 seconds to open the right-click menu on the desktop.

During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.

From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.

[Rohansi]

Other than hardware it could also be some third-party software hooking into Explorer to do who knows what.

[simulator5g]

Microsoft is responsible for the UX of the ecosystem they create. Things that extend the OS are part of that responsibility. It shouldn't be possible for such a thing to happen. The OS could just show the damn menu after 500ms even if some extension hasn't responded.

[Rohansi]

The extensions are native code loaded directly into the Explorer process and called from the UI thread. There is no async option they can time out.

It's not the recommended way to hook into the context menu. They have had declarative options for a long time which do not cause issues like this.

[p_ing]

The reason the Windows 11 menu changed was to solve for this exact issue.

[simulator5g]

I don't have anything that hooks into the Windows 11-style menu though. The only additional options in the "Show more options" / Windows 10-style menu are Nvidia stuff which comes with the PC, and Visual Studio, which is Microsoft. This is not caused by some crappy 3rd party app.

The new menu is faster, it takes about .5 to 1 second to appear. Pretty great compared to 10 seconds for the old style menu. Still a very noticeable lag for a simple task on a top-shelf Windows laptop.

To be fair the delays get better when you repeatedly open the context menu. It seems to get everything cached and then it loads in ~0.5 second. But it loses this speed when you don't open the menu for a while.