I think you can pretty much say that about everything in Windows 11. Seeing the XP emulation on the front page yesterday reminded me how grotesquely slow 10 and 11 are. Honestly I wonder if you ran one of the old Windows versions on period hardware how it would compare to now. And then keeping the period hardware but if you swapped to an SSD I bet it would fly. But maybe it's rose-tinted glasses.
Personally I preferred Vista to 7 (7 took away a bunch of nice things). Even as bad as Windows Me was from a stability point of view, it at least added new features. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that Windows 11 does better than before.
Windows 2000 was snappy. Incredibly so.
I'd try to dig it up but search is so fundamentally broken these days I can't find it.
I definitely thought that was less than two years ago...sigh
That video touches on something else that drives me crazy: the decay of keyboard shortcuts
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All that being said, I will play devil's advocate for at least one modern luxury that I wouldn't want to live without that I can understand makes performance more difficult: per-monitor DPI that can change on the fly. But still: 8.1 (with ClassicShell) was fairly snappy
Yes, there are always "reasons", but things have got dramatically worse, with especially 8 -> 10 -> 11.
It particularly annoys me when apps/widget/utilities partially load in and sit there with nothing but a blank chrome, slowly partially rendering.
It's a plague that has affected everything, even Task Manager.
Now, holy smokes - what a dumpster fire. Most of the time it doesn't get me out of trouble anymore. Here are some of my favorite Windows 11 UI changes:
- complete waste of space on the side now. it doesn't even save any vertical space because of how bloated it is
- nonsense iconography on the side (services, startup apps in particular)
- Processes: "..." overflow has one item, View. I get that they want it more touch friendly but even then how clunky is that to navigate?!
- Performance: Resource Monitor was right there, now it is again buried in a stupid "..." menu, again to save space for...nothing?
- Details: The column picker is preposterous. It was already annoying before, mostly because you couldn't resize it, but they didn't fix that, no. Now you can see only 5 columns at a time. I seem to remember the column selection used to be a bit better before Windows 8 or 10 (like there was some other way to get that menu besides right-clicking the column headers) but I can't easily check
- In general I find that "Processes", "Performance", and "Details" all disagree about CPU usage
Tip: `taskmgr -d` runs the previous UI
"If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph, double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode"
and
"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc."
and
"If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it. Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT, and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh"
How to discover any of this except by reading a reddit post by the developer?
"There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed."
Why is this even necessary? It's a part of the OS, it should not need One Weird Trick to kill processes.
Also happened on Gnome.
There's a general anti-keyboard conspiracy.
I have a feeling if you high-end hardware of that period, it will feel faster than win11 on high-end hardware now.
However, the other software also evolved. You almost cannot use modern internet with old browser.
Edit: The latest attack came in the form of a full-screen system level (covered the taskbar) advert for Windows 11 when I logged in a few weeks ago, complete with all the dark patters we expect from our tech overlords in 2025. Now the windows update status icon also has a constant blue dot on it. Clicking it lets me know I should upgrade to Windows 11 ASAP. Realistically, I'll probably reluctantly switch once Steam stops supporting Windows 10.
Also can't avoid mentioning Windows 11 gaming without the middle finger that is discontinuing Windows Mixed Reality and bricking the headsets. Thankfully someone looks to be making a SteamVR driver for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...), but what a pathetic shame he's doing it on his own time rather than MS paying the pocket change it would have taken to do it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinJS
When Windows 8 was initially previewed at Microsoft's developers conference, .NET wasn't still part of the overall picture.
How many people are proficient enough in C nowadays to maintain the old shell?
I drank the WinRT Kool Aid between Windows 8, Windows Phone and the clear failure of Project Reunion.
Still I keep myself around, expecially to warn newbies that whatever Microsoft is selling for WinUI, regardless of the shiny cover, the book inside is roten.
Whatever I have learnt from community calls and endless Github discussions, is that most new interns never did Windows development before landing on Windows team.
The calls are available on YouTube, mostly young, puzzled looks when questioned about feature XYZ coming to Windows, not even understanding issues that come from Windows 8 and 8.1 UAP model, that predated UWP, among other possible examples.
I would dare to say they did all their studies in UNIX world, Apple, Google devices, before landing a job at Microsoft.
So Web technologies it is.
Note I am not blaming them, each one gets to learn what they can, how they can.
The blame lies on upper management of a 4 trillion valued company, that isn't able to put in place the resources and learnings, so that the team can actually deliver, as it used to be during the 3x "Developers!" dance.