Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by _cenw » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

scq wrote: post #282

rafaelmn wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and : - fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps - I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1 - Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've ha…

- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling. - HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoron…

You can also buy active DP to HDMI 2.1 adapters now - if you already have an HDMI KVM for instance. Cable Matters makes one.

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

#712

Post by naikrovek » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:45 PM UTC

varunneal wrote: post #660

stevage wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.

hey there's preview

yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.

quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro was amazing and I miss it a bit.

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

#713

Post by mike_hearn » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

p_ing wrote: post #442

mike_hearn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people dis…

The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from. https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K... > The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.

That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.

The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.

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

#714

Post by spookie » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #669

spookie wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.

I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your next point. We value getting things released and do not have a solid process for optimizing without adding new things. Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to specifically have given us better software?

Fair, I just think there is a huge overlap between bad practice and speed of development. The latter fuels the former in many ways.

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

#715

Post by layer8 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #555

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.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

> How did we get back to this though?

By piling up nonzero-cost abstractions left and right.

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

#716

Post by scioto » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me.

I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux.

I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.

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

#717

Post by bsrkf » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

likium wrote: post #680

bsrkf wrote: post #549

Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software? I would happily pay for software that was high-quality was fast was privacy preserving had sane defaults had/provided reasonable support/insight (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing mode…

There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently had an email and calendar client. And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better quality product.

Nowhere have I claimed that the whole product would need (nor should) be fully open source and why wouldn't non-US wages help?

Assuming it takes me X-amount of software engineering hours to produce an alpha version of a given product and now let's imagine a rented office space plus four developers; consider renting in a major US city, and paying competitive US-major-city-wages versus doing so in a significantly smaller city in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia).

In both cases you could develop an English-Language version of your product for global use and you can distribute software cheaply over the internet; you'd still charge customers in the US US-prices, yet would have saved on development costs.

I'm sure this comes with its own set of difficulties, especially regarding US business customers, but initially it could be an advantage in certain scenarios.

There also seems to be a current push towards non-US (sometimes even specifically from-EU) products in tech, which might give one an interesting market position, albeit I'm lacking details here, and it's yet to pan out how viable this trend is long-term of course.

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

#718

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

dimgl wrote: post #384

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads…

> Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.

Not to defend Microsoft, as I've firmly believed them to be a shitty entity for a loooong time now, but as a counter example and many years going on Windows 10/11, I don't have any of these issues and I've only run debloater maybe a few times in the last 5 years.

I don't know wtf people are installing on their PCs to make them so shitty like this, but I've not encountered these things across dozens of personal or employer devices in recent in times. Like not even once. Maybe you're downloading beta drivers? Maybe the manufacturer of your devices are cheapo brands with poorly made chipsets? Maybe you have bloatware installed by your manufacturer that you haven't uninstalled? At this stage, it's hard to believe this is not some kind of user error. Be it a lack of research before acquiring a device, or lack of knowledge on how to navigate the device.

Edit: to put into perspective a bit more, I use my main laptop - a Lenovo Legion laptop - for gaming (many acquired through the "dark waters" even), full-stack software development, AI video up-scaling, photo-editing, running a media-server (Jellyfin), torrenting, office programs, running virtual machines, running WSL2 with docker, running many various open-source programs, producing music with Ableton and a plethora of third-party VSTs, etc.

No issues.

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

#719

Post by tiffanyh » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

Electron?

Isn't Microsoft migrating all of their Office apps over to WebView2 (their version of Electron).

If so, I wonder how much of this is related to that than anything else?

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

#720

Post by layer8 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

stcroixx wrote: post #619

MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office. Most programmers today don't have the skills they think they do and would find working on something like Office boring.

Ironically, at the start of my career working on something like Office was my dream, and would actually still be. I reserve to change my mind once I’ve seen the code base, though. ;)