Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marginalia_nu 24 days ago
I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer. It's like it's barely attached to reality. There's this weird floaty delay in everything. You copy a file, or did you? You're not sure. It hasn't updated yet. Oh, now the copy dialog appears with this progress bar that isn't showing progress. The dialog just sits there. Is something happening? I don't know. Many seconds later the dialog closes. But it hasn't showed up in the window yet... oh, now it did!

How is that even possible, especially with modern hardware? Like you'd almost have to build the file explorer around like a sqlite-based message queue with a 1500ms poll interval to get performance characteristics like this. Absolutely insane feats of architecture astronautism are no doubt required for this to happen.

5 comments

>I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer.

I was wondering how bad a sign it was when the decline in performance between Windows 95 and Windows 98 was detectable in many ways, but nobody was complaining because it was not always noticeable on PCs that were 3 years newer. You had to figure Microsoft developers had way better PCs than that, and didn't have any clue at all.

Turns out my suspicions were correct, it was the insidiously ignored ramp-up to exponential amounts of sluggishness as time marches on.

You know, like a snail without a shell :(

The new Windows Explorer uses WinRT/WinUI, with its AddRef/Release all over the place.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/microsofts-window...

And yes, it sucks,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/1...

Wild theory for fun: this is on purpose to condition people in order to seamlessly switch to OneDrive as whole data drive.

At least your description matches some the pain I get using NFS + lf.

Well yeah, it kinda feels like you're using NFS, and the server you're connecting to is in orbit around mars and is using a pringles cantenna to get its wifi signal back to earth.

Like the vanilla file explorer experience is way worse than anything I've come to expect with stuff like CIFS and SMB.

It’s probably got phone home a few times to to make sure they’re measuring user engagement
Electron?