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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

#431

Post by dspillett »

jajko wrote: post #230
vjk800 wrote: post #192

I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stop…

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bar…

How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.

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

#432

Post by esskay »

PuppetSoup wrote: post #221
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI.

And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need to.

Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't quite feel like they've nailed the experience.

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

#433

Post by p_ing »

QuantumSeed wrote: post #175

I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --no-startup-window --win-session-start

Safari does the same thing on macOS; it has a launch agent to speed the first instance of opening Safari up, as well as a process to send notifications presumably from web apps you've allowed to do so.

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

#434

Post by int_19h »

jeroenhd wrote: post #261
geekifier wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outl…

I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!

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

#435

Post by p_ing »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #350

Quite a few years ago I read on Reddit a post made allegedly by a Microsoft programmer, who was telling that the young generation of programmers do not want to maintain the old optimized code (he was saying specifically about pipes in windows) and want to reimplement all fro scratch. In this example (pipes) they wrote a new pipe mechanism which then was lacking that ACL et. al. authorisation features and they had to…

Yeah, I'd take that with a giant grain. You can't "hide" features that the system uses -- they're all visible. This is why NT APIs get used, even though they're not supposed to be leveraged outside of the kernel/critical system components. There's no "hiding" a pipe.

Mail Slots are on their way out, though. Not that they're useful today.

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

#436

Post by tremon »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.

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

#437

Post by 101008 »

sgarland wrote: post #382
alliao wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"

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

#438

Post by chuckadams »

criddell wrote: post #293
worldsayshi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.

Software compatibility in general. There’s still a lot of Windows-only software out there that people rely on. Also, security-by-default for apps would be nice. Snap and Flatpak are great starts but it’s still to difficult to manage and too easy to install non-sandboxed software. Some random weather app should never have access to your photos, camera, file system, networking, etc… without the user explicitly granting…

There's Qubes, but even its enthusiasts are quick to say in its current incarnation it's not in any shape to be foisted on an end user. The other Linux flavor that sandboxes apps by default would be Android, which seems to have a few users.

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

#439

Post by mjmas »

alliao wrote: post #340
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...

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

#440

Post by 9dev »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #260
geekifier wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...

As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.

Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.

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