Today my Windows 10 PC told me that the "Snipping Tool" had been deprecated and would I like to try the new W10 version? So I did. And when I took a screenshot, it said something like "please wait while we make your screenshot" for about 20 seconds! What could POSSIBLY take so long‽

> What could POSSIBLY take so long‽

This is something I find myself asking more and more almost every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the idea that they can just have their software just wake up and do things without the user commanding it?

Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move instantly. There is nothing more important that the computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic, very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern" computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type. Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like this.

EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody cares about performance" problem.

Boot FreeDOS from a USB stick on a modern computer, or even a 15-20 years old computer. Gives you some perspective on how fast the hardware really is, even when using only a single core.

Goes to show how we, the end users, don't matter much. There's just so many other profitable metrics to optimize for.

Worse is Calculator. Why does that app that simple take a noticeable (small, but not instant) delay to open on a pretty decent machine?

(also why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating?)

> why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating

Some oxygen waster's salary and career is tied to these metrics.

I bet the calculatory functionality is small enough to load instantly.

I suspect that it's he heavyweight GUI library that takes a lot of time to initialize.

Filling rectangles is hard in windows 10. They shall use BGI, it's faster.

Surely not image compression.

Sounds like your screenshots are being conveniently uploaded to MS servers so you could share them (Yay!).

Getting such enormous delays when performing otherwise simple operations usually means that network requests are being made, and servers aren't normally snappy when it comes to free storage.

Here is my example of enormous loading times: it takes a few minutes to clear browsing history on the android version of Chrome browser. Quite outrageous.

On my barebones Windows 10, clicking the WiFi menu makes it hang for up to 5 seconds until the little popup appears where you can turn WiFi on/off or choose the network.

Windows 2000 on the Pentium 3 with 300 MHz felt way snappier.

The Linux desktop isn't perfect, but basic stuff like that works way better there on the same machine.

Windows 10 is in fact doing something when you click the Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar. That's the moment it chooses to actually poll for networks. This ties up your Wi-Fi card and dramatically increases ping for about two seconds, in short pulses.

The UI should instantly display the previously known APN list while loading the new one in the background. Microsoft has multiple teams researching asynchronous programming, but their work doesn’t seem to make it to the desktop.

I’ve never seen that, perhaps it was preloading the actual tool that makes the screenshot (since they seem to like lazy-loading features nowadays). Is this different from the Windows key+shift+S tool?

I use the new Snip&Sketch tool all the time on multiple computers and it never takes more than a fraction of a second. Maybe it was just slow the very first time you used it?

Doesn't fix Windows "Upgrades" ruining workflows, but Sharex[1] is a very useful utility that you might be interested in. System-wide hotkeys for screenshots, can do short encoded video, optional auto-uploading, etc.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

Windows seems to be super stupid about cloud syncing, especially when one drive. For some reason, it seems like sync is a blocking action that will freeze the UI.

I would expect to just write it to disk and sync whenever. Instead it seems to take seconds any time it hits “the cloud” and makes me wait. So I bet your screencap tried to transfer your file.

I see this when trying to open files from OneDrive even though I have it local. Word will take seconds to “browse” through online OneDrive directories even though I have them local. So it might take 10 seconds just to pick a folder to save a file.

And of course, afterwards my cpu will peg for minutes doing something.

FWIW, I've switched to Greenshot and I couldn't be happier. So many useful features. I donated to the developers due to the annotation features alone.

Would be fun to reverse that app and find out!

It must ask the mighty Gates for permission (they care about your privacy) and must request database access in the new FBI server. And then maybe execute some crappy JS because they are not able to program in C anymore.

probably telemetry of every running process, which ones have gui features, and which running process has a gui currently visible on your screen and sending all that data to MS.

obviously, that's just a guess.

Why does bringing up the menu to eject a USB disk take so long? Maybe 5s on my PC.

It's been like that since Win7.

Analytics? Maybe under the guise of "search your screenshots later for people, apps, or words on the screen!"

QA should be done on a cheapest phone available to buy at the telcos 2 years ago.

For Microsoft sure, but people who buy the cheapest phone aren’t the target customer for most products.

I’ve seen some very rich people use some shockingly old hardware. It’s not about penny pinching, many don’t think about upgrading regularly largely because upgrading tends to be an annoying process.

Like, you know, calling, navigation, discount codes or news.

Not latest iPhone = poor, right?

Depends.... Social networks, bank apps, chat apps, casual games, productivity apps, music/video players,... basically everything except new games still should work, even on shitty phones.

If it involves spending money and your business model isn’t to make pennies at massive scale, it makes no sense to optimize for those who actively reduce costs. I don’t remember the exact percentages, but there’s a quip that Apple has something like 90% of the profit with under 30% market share.

Tons of Apple users are still on old phones like iPhone 8 or even 6S. Those are still counted in the 30% market share but they have slow phones.

So, throw away literally billions of users worldwide? Outside of USA, apple has a very, very small market share, and cheap (weak) android phones are the norm.

For example, Facebook ("lite") and google ("go") already optimize their apps to those markets. Why not eg McDonalds?

Some businesses optimize for profit and not userbase or mindshare.

Not every business earns its revenue by casting the widest net possible. Focus on users who are known to have the discretionary funds to buy new iPhones and then you’ve also focused on users who aren’t as likely to penny-pinch when deciding whether to pay for your products.

Apple had over 100 percent of the profit in the phone market for a quarter a few years ago. Every android handset maker lost money.

Or rather the "developer time is cheaper than machine time" culture.

Oy. I meant "developer time is more expensive than machine time." It's been a long day.

This is more true than ever when the machine is my cellphone.