Windows 11 is getting another free speed boost for apps. I wonder why all this performance tuning wasn’t done sooner
- Windows 11 has a new preview version with a change to improve performance
- For starters, it’s Edge-only and means that if the browser is already running, new instances of the app will start faster.
- Microsoft’s plan is to introduce this to a wider range of Windows 11 apps
Microsoft is making another move to tune Windows 11 to launch some apps more quickly, although this is only in testing for now.
Windows Latest noted that the latest build in the Release Preview channel (the final stage of testing) applies a change to bring “accelerated app launches” for Microsoft Edge in a certain scenario. That is, when Edge is already running, more instances of the web browser will appear that open at a faster speed.
Microsoft tells us that: “When you select a link or open Edge from the taskbar or Start menu while Edge is already running in the background, Windows now directs your request directly to the running instance instead of first starting an additional temporary process.”
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This shortened boot path for when Edge is “hot” (already running) means a considerably faster boot time, as verified by Windows Latest.
The tech site also notes that only the first “cold” startup of the browser will be slower (with the startup process longer), since even if you open Edge and then close it, if you run the app again, it is still “hot” since the relevant processes have been sped up in the background.
Analysis: Wider benefits, but why did all this take so long?
If you don’t use Edge (and that’s certainly most of you), then you might be thinking: what’s the big deal anyway? Well, this is a first step in testing toward a broader goal, namely a “broader Windows capability that any application can adopt to speed up its own launches,” as Microsoft explains in the preview notes.
Over time, we could see multiple applications benefiting from what appears to be a considerable performance boost upon startup, assuming they are already running (and warming up). It could be some time before Microsoft opens this up to third-party developers, of course, and then they have to implement the functionality.
In any case, it’s a useful new feature that adds to Microsoft’s existing work to allow preloading of certain Windows 11 apps, notably Edge itself and File Explorer. We have also witnessed the introduction of the Low Latency Profile feature, which represents a nice CPU speed boost for Windows 11 menus and also apps.
The main question is: why did it take Microsoft so long to achieve these performance improvements? File Explorer’s slowness was a complaint from the beginning with Windows 11, and yet we’ve had to suffer from this (and several other cases of slowness) for years before they were fixed. It wasn’t until this year, when Microsoft properly focused its attention on fixing Windows 11, that we saw solutions emerge.
And don’t get me wrong, that’s great, but it also shows that Microsoft didn’t take these performance issues seriously until the Windows 11 user base was more or less in open rebellion over the push for AI features while all of these issues continued to frustrate people. It’s pretty clear that Windows 11 optimization could have been done in the past, if Microsoft was willing to help with the task, but the company didn’t see it as enough of a priority, bafflingly.
I admit that even when Microsoft does something good here, I complain and that the company can’t win in this sense. Fair enough, and it’s all well and good, as they say, but what I really hope is that Microsoft can learn from this in the future and act sooner to fix the problems with its desktop operating system when it clearly has problems.
Whatever the next generation of Windows is, it must adopt this new attitude and move forward, until Microsoft has an operating system that runs smoothly for daily operations in all important aspects, from performance to usability, not to mention reliability and stable updates, which is still a big problem that remains to be solved.
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