I think search is hard generally.
I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges.<p>For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows).
However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web.<p>If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search, and pressing enter opens Safari.<p>Relevant results (folders + files) do appear, but usually you have to scroll.<p>The search bar itself comes up very quickly though.<p>If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this:
Window management is utter garbage. Maximizing is actively discouraged. Tiling left / right etc? Doesn't exist. Everything must be random size and overlap weirdly. Instead, each new version brings a new quick switch or workspace functionality that I have never seen anyone use.<p>Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times!
It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some http request. I noticed that often the online version of these apps (namely Outlook) are more responsive than the desktop counterparts.<p>Edit: My experience with Excel - <a href="https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20</a>
The worst thing about the Windows Start Menu search is that it changes the top result without any user input, and it feels like it happens almost every time I use Windows.<p>I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want.<p>But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a page of useless Bing results.<p>Just infuriating, and makes me so glad that I'm using Rofi/Wofi, which <i>never</i> changes the results without user input, and responds to keypresses with no perceptible delay, even when searching across every file in my home directory (via fzf).
Sorry to be <i>that guy</i>, but this is why XFCE is so good!<p>Them random delays when doing simple things in windows is so frustrating.<p>A desktop should get out of your way, and be so quick you don't notice it. Window switches, minimizing, maximising, launching, closing etc. Or my personal favourite, type and the letters take their time to appear.<p>Only after you have worked with a system that never ever lags on these everyday actions do you see how frustrating it is to work every day with these laggy things.<p>I saw some Mac users comment on the lack of lag on their laptops! I'm sure they can identify with how nice it is.
Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the <i>supposed</i> inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate.<p>If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
Across 2 different machines, 100% repo, the start button on my keyboard only opens the start menu every other time I push it. It has been that way for 4+ years, it went away for a bit after an update, then came back again.<p>Microsoft never has recovered from their dismantling of their test organizations.
There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search<p>1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?)<p>2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed<p>3) Partial searches don't work very well.<p>At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app
It probably hasn't been addressed because user experience is depressingly low priority for microsoft...<p>And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.
Meanwhile, an Amiga with a half meg of RAM and a 7 to 25 MHz processor never fails to respond <i>instantly</i> to user input unless it's totally hosed.<p>We seem to have forgotten this very fundamental principle: the user's desires, expressed through input, are <i>paramount</i> for a desktop OS, which means that the OS must be designed from the ground up to respond to input at a very high priority. Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not have this critical bit of forethought. Haiku probably does, and I think macOS might, especially on Apple Silicon.
And if it's randomascii hitting these issues and still not able to resolve them, holy hell, you're not going to get a bigger power user big analysis than this, MS, step to it!
From an IT support & admin point of view The Windows 10+ XML based start menu stuff has been bit of a dumpster fire the whole time. Start menus would randomly not work at all and need the users whole profile nuking to resolve. Who wants to see results from Bing in their start menu? Anyone? Controling start menu and taskbar for the org by policy is way more complicated now. Yes you can make it work eventually but it could be so much easier if anyone at Microsoft gave a crap about users and admins any more.
I've always kind of wondered if this is working as intended. Occasionally I type the name of an installed program, but the result loads slowly for whatever reason, but in the meantime there's almost <i>instantly</i> a search link which, if I press <Enter> thinking my result was found, opens up Edge (a browser I never launch otherwise) and inevitably shows me a variety of advertisements, rather than launching the program I already have on my computer.<p>This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.
It sounds like a good idea to preemptively disable Windows Error Reporting. I usually do it (and kill all other telemetry I can find) on all Windows machines I set up.<p>Microsoft’s going to need to try harder than this to convince me to keep it enabled.
Windows Start Menu has been broken for me sometimes (typing does nothing, have to re-click the menu to toggle it a few times and then it works), over the last few months.
Last few weeks has been ok.<p>And recently completely-finished browser downloads have to wait extra long (beyond when the browser says it's done) plus an F5 in Explorer, for Windows to not complain about a "missing file at path" when trying to use the completely-downloaded file. This could be an interaction with a virus-scanner (ESET) putting the file in quarantine or whatever real quick before putting it back out but nothing has changed on my end in the last ~4 years.<p>I appreciate that the author here is actually profiling stuff.
I've long thought that Windows NT might make a pretty good OS if it weren't married to the Microsoft Windows interface. I know I'm abusing the terminology here, but only because the concept of a replaceable graphical shell is utterly foreign to an OS which began as one of many replaceable graphical shells for MS-DOS.
I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.
On Windows 11 the start menu is simply unusable; there is no way at all to disable network requests (group policy, registry, etc.). Every single keystroke makes a new network requests, even with web search disabled.<p>I just bought Start11.
Why the hell does windows think it's ok to secretly phone home with crash reports by default, especially when sending those makes the problem worse by slowing down the crash recovery? In this case the problem would probably have been insignificant if not for super slow, blocking, error telemetry. At least store these and send them later, sheesh.
I've switched to using PowerToys Run (in the Microsoft PowerToys apps family). It's good to have access to everything in one place (including open windows, settings, ..) and access them without touching the mouse, however the lag can sometimes get annoying. On the plus side it's open source and continuously improved.
While the ETW is helpful with a deep dive into problem analysis, a look into the Event Viewer can give some initial hint about crashing processes and other system/app faults.<p>Sometimes I page through the Event Viewer entries, trying to find something interesting what went wrong in the last weeks/months.
Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.
This is exactly why I use OSS whenever possible. Once you've gone through all the trouble of the post, you can spend a little more time to submit a patch.
I just use Everything by voidtools and assign a taskbar icon to it so it can be launched windows + 3. Other applications I often use are in the taskbar so windows + <number> (0-9) work for opening them. Beats using the Start Menu.
Swichting to custom launchers (ueli or Flow Launcher for e.g.) has worked wonders for me.<p>That being said, it was really fun to read the article. The amount of work and knowledge that went into this has to be immense. Thanks for sharing!
> I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter.<p>That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like <a href="https://keypirinha.com/" rel="nofollow">https://keypirinha.com/</a>) to avoid the freeze and many other issues (like having to move your focus off screen center) with this neglected core OS functionality. While you're at it, you could also rebind it to something more ergonomic like CapsLock tap (but not hold)
For me it is a pet peeve that the start menu regularly takes a vacation.<p>It's particularly bad when the machine is starting, it seems the machine would rather listen to the music in its head than take commands from me. I wish it would put a priority on getting the start menu up and running even if it meant caching the state of it ahead of time so it can resume quickly -- I mean, there are just a few commands that I type in 90%+ of the time if it had those ready to go and took another second or to look up something obscure I could forgive it.
I use Win-Key and type stuff to launch programs in GNOME and it works very well, doing this in Windows hasn't worked well in the time I can remember using it - at best the search is slow, but a lot of the time it just doesn't find the thing I want - it feels janky.
The lagging inputs in Windows reminds me of the concept of a “Windows Minute”<p>Definition: A reference to time where the culculated period bears no connection to the reality of that time span. Used to understate the significance of accurate measurement.<p>Origin: Microsoft Windows' inability to convey an accurate file download, or transfer, time.<p><a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20minute" rel="nofollow">https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20mi...</a><p>The lag in Windows is what made me switch to Mac, Using Finder and Spotlight and managing applications in the Applications folder made me never want to experience Windows again.
It looks like Windows phones home every time you hit the start button, and when web search crashes, it arbitrarily waits for the crash dump to be reported to the mother ship before launching again.<p>The most useful information is at the bottom of the comments:<p>"I had some of the same issues – just with start menu being too slow. I disabled web search for start menu, and it works, is fast, only finds apps (and other local stuff; documents, folder, settings – but only when you navigate to that specified search target).
Bottomline – turning off web search in start menu = speed<p>regedit/use at own discretion:
HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
“DisableSearchBoxSuggestions”=dword:00000001"
I _really_ recommend Keypirinha [1] for any sane use of Windows. This little tool has rocketed my productivity (I also prefer it above Microsoft PowerToys Run).<p>[1]: <a href="https://keypirinha.com/" rel="nofollow">https://keypirinha.com/</a>
I stopped using windows search a while ago.<p>It is unreasonably slow. Everything (the app) indexes every file on all of your drives in seconds, then filters the list instantly as you type.<p>When I start typing an application name that has a shortcut in the start menu, it shouldn't take seconds to find, period. There is no excuse. I'm shocked how bad windows search is every time I have to use it on another machine.<p>After trying multiple application launchers, I've settled with UELI. It does a lot of things (much more than windows search), instantly.
Can confirm that start menu random lag happens on Windows 11 too.<p>I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.
> <i>I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution</i><p>REALLY<p>Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?