As the other comment here notes, shell extensions have been around for a long time, and have never been a problem on older versions of Windows running on hardware that's much slower than what's available today.
The problem is a lot of the times they make poor assumptions (like "if a process is running it'll respond instantly") and honestly the tools that exist for determining what is at fault are... well effectively nonexistent[1]. This goes even for 1st party shell extensions. Part of the problem is these almost inherently violate what I consider one of the golden rules of GUI programming (don't block the UI thread) and there's a lot of historical reason for this, but it is often the cause of stuff like "explorer.exe uses 100% CPU" or "right-click takes 30 seconds"
[1]: There's a SuperUser post in which the recommendation is effectively: manually binary search for culprit shell extensions yourself (https://superuser.com/a/577935/312312).
(e) added the bit about the loading text.
The amount of bloat in modern software is simply obscene.
Right clicks on my MacBook are perceptually instantaneous.
Win 11 is _slow_. 10 times slower as Win10
I work in IT (for many, many years).. support hundreds of computers, and don't have the luxury of configuring each to my liking. I have to use the tools that are available and learned a long time ago to make due with with Windows explorer.
Windows 10 Explorer was a perfect vehicle then they had to go and throw a shitty wrap and other afternarket trash on it.
Edit: nevermind the times you have to manually hit F5 so the file you just renamed displays the new name, instead of auto-refreshing. What the sweet hell did they do?
Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same building blocks, no?!
Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.
Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack Overflow until something compiles.
It is quite obvious from whoever takes place on community calls, or that still answers on endless Github discussions, that their background isn't Windows development.
You see this by them usually not understanding what the framework is still missing from MFC, Forms, WPF, both in features, and Visual Studio tooling.
All the key figures from Windows 8 days regarding WinRT, left for Amazon, Google, or internally to Azure and AI groups.
I am personally a huge fan of win32. I was even a ReactOS contributor at one point because of this. That being said, it wasn’t scalable without major changes. Thankfully most win32 apps still work on Windows.
It is like Windows Development team has something against nice tooling for COM, only man with hard bear are supposed to handle it. /s
You guys really should gift some kudos to Microsoft. As crappy as they can be, they often open source stuff.
Also, TIL that this apparently been open sourced for years.
nashashmi•9mo ago