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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

pcworld.com

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#161

Post by whyoh »

hinkley wrote: post #45
_--__--__ wrote: post #18

I genuinely don't know if it was a bug or intentional behavior like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave several of its background browser engine processes running indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they're just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their convenience of their devs.

I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not child processes for unknown client apps.

That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge WebView2.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#163

Post by tomatocracy »

bambax wrote: post #132
mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#164

Post by yallpendantools »

I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now.

It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows land.

In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be expected.

I thought I've made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes ages for the prompt to even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input.

After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---drumroll---NodeJS. Don't quote me on this but I think Node brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal.

Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such that Node doesn't actually do anything unless I invoke it myself. The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without having ran `node` beforehand.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#165

Post by andruby »

vasco wrote: post #143
kilotaras wrote: post #119

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus. Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others. One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.

That could already be the case. The initial release is from 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old.

I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#166

Post by peppers-ghost »

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#167

Post by HPsquared »

yallpendantools wrote: post #164

I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now. It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows lan…

Node is doing stuff when you just try to open a terminal window? How does that work?!

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#169

Post by rahen »

Headlines like this make me glad that org-mode has almost completely replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for me (not to mention calendar notifications and Python notebooks). The only exception is spreadsheets with charts, which still require LibreOffice.

Granted, I don’t work in a corporate environment, so I’m free to choose my own tools. Living in Emacs is a blessing in today’s world of bloat, lack of control, short-lived cycles, and SaaS everything.

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