MS Word opens twice as slow on Windows 11 PCs as on MacBooks, and Microsoft has no excuse

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/02/ms-word-opens-twice-as-slow-on-windows-11-pcs-as-on-macbooks-and-microsoft-has-no-excuse/

331 points · 56 comments · view on lemmy.world

56 Comments

Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip · 107 pts · 41d (2 replies)

Knowing Microslop™, they'll fix it by loading every document on your computer into memory at boot and call it "Quick Launch"

gratux@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 72 pts · 41d (1 reply)

True Microslop™ behaviour would be to only do this for documents in OneDrive, then tell users to store all documents there for "improved performance"

Vlyn@lemmy.zip · 26 pts · 41d

That just sent a weird shiver down my spine.

Bebopalouie@lemmy.ca · 51 pts · 41d

And worse, they don’t even care.

freeman@sh.itjust.works · 34 pts · 40d (2 replies)

Old school MS would just add some seconds delay to the Mac version.

Railcar8095@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 40d (1 reply)

I want to have to book an appointment every time I want to use a Microsoft product.

rmuk@feddit.uk · 6 pts · 40d

Great! I'll just fire up Outlook to put that into my cale oh no

SpicyLizards@reddthat.com · 22 pts · 41d

Gotta load that sweet telemetry

Syndication@lemmy.today · 19 pts · 41d
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dregan@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 41d

Microsoft's excuse: 🖕

Taleya@aussie.zone · 14 pts · 40d (3 replies)

Jokes on you i'm still running word 2007

Tiral@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 40d (2 replies)

Yar matie! That be a good choice!

Taleya@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 40d (1 reply)

Whole damned office suite including visio

rmuk@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 40d

Give me Frontpage or give me death!

melsaskca@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 40d (2 replies)

"And Microsoft has no excuse (they'd be willing to admit to).". Those wacky little degenerates and their "back doors". We need serious people back in the tech world again. Men and women of honour, with standards.

Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 40d (1 reply)

They all moved to linux or are bound by golden handcuffs. Source: my entire friend group

Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 40d

I worked with some former Microsoft people. It was ridiculous. So much drama. They were constantly pushing initiatives that made no sense. They cared more about their weird culture than they did about making great products. I think that Ballmer broke Microsoft. His endless stacked-ranking made people focus on corporate politics and resume padding over quality.

Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip · 6 pts · 41d

Oh but they do- their excuse is incompetence! They have so much excuse. And by excuse I mean they have so much incompence 😀

cholesterol@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 40d

I'm done with MS myself, but at the same time I like to be conscious that news sites are milking the sentiment of frustrated users by constantly rephrasing "MS said they are going to be improve X" into "MS admits that X is bad".

Archimedes@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 40d (1 reply)

My linguistic pet peeve is using compounds to describe a negative.

Twice as slow < half as fast.

treesapx@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 40d

Twice as ugly ? Half as pretty

Brkdncr@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 41d (8 replies)

Legacy code bloat. How much of that macOS code is even from win32 word?

Damage@feddit.it · 15 pts · 41d (5 replies)

I don't think it's the old code that's bloated. I've been using office '97 at work for... reasons, and despite some bugs it still runs on the latest windows server, does pretty much everything Word 365 does and is much faster.... really makes you think.

blackbeans@lemmy.zip · 18 pts · 41d

Word 97 also has a memory requirement of 8 MB. That legacy win32 code is extremely optimized, programmed in a time where every bit and byte was considered. It's today's background services and applications that slow Windows down, consuming memory and cycles for no apparent reason.

Office apps have also become much slower and less stable since they integrated cloud support and bolted on javascript for the user interface.

GenosseFlosse@feddit.org · 3 pts · 41d (2 replies)

I had the same issue with slow loading office at work. If you check the network request, office opens 10 or even more connections on startup, i guess at least one is for licence check, possibly another one for one drive. However one of the requests took more than 8 seconds to complete, and during the whole time office would just sit idle.

FuglyDuck@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 41d

ostensibly, it's also for things like collaboration. But I'm willing to bet that at least half the data going across the servers are telemetry and... if we're being honest, probably corporate espionage.

Damage@feddit.it · 1 pts · 40d

Not to mention new outlook which won't even open without an internet connection

GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 3 pts · 40d

I'm pretty sure Office 97 was the last version to not use ribbons or have auto-arranging menus. As a support worker, nothing was worse than those two items. Having to walk someone through clicking a series of static menus was so much easier, could even be done in a doc with optional graphics, and the user might learn something in the process. After those things, there was no standard, anything could be anywhere, and there was no guarantee you or the user would know where to find the thing you were looking for. And they called it progress.

Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com · 5 pts · 40d

Last I heard the Mac version of word was entirely different code than the Windows program. Different teams too.

But that was a long time ago. Things could have changed especially with the change to subscription/web deployment.

SirActionSack@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 41d

Nah I use office 2013 at work because fuck 365 and it is fine.

mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 40d

maybe one day someone can get to the bottom of why it takes thirty seconds to open a local Excel file

Alexstarfire@lemmy.world · -22 pts · 41d (7 replies)

12 seconds for a 500-page doc? Are people just that impatient these days? Does everyone have ADHD? People will find anything to complain about.

Weirdfish@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 41d (5 replies)

Not sure how well Moore's law is holding up these days, but considering a typical PC is streaming hi res video these days opening a 500 page text file should happen so fast you don't even notice it.

Modern Windows and many of the core software are pathetically unoptimized, wasting time and resources because as others have pointed out, "fuck you" seems to be the mantra now days.

I dig through a ton of reference material every day for work, and should be able to open a file, control-f to the relevant information, and close it again as fast as my fingers can type.

Syndication@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 41d (1 reply)
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Mikina@programming.dev · 4 pts · 41d

Windows 11 recently had to start enabling some kind of turbo CPU mode just to open a right click menu on files, because otherwise it took more than 5-10 seconds. Same with File Browser.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-11-low-latency-profile-cpu-boost

They are extremely incompetent.

I had to use Teams for a week because of a second jpb I do occasional contracts for, and it was baffling how extremely worse has it gotten in the last two years.

Three times! It has happened that the teams would load (after going through login loop twice times for some reason) that it would load and show everything as usuall. Only after like three hours of waiting for answer I've noticed that my message actually didn't send, without any error or indicator, and that everyone's, including mine, status is "Undefined" and nothing works - messages don't send, just appear sent, and I'm not getting any messages.

The only indicator was that everyone's status dot was a hollow grey circle, and that messages did not have the sent checkmark but just a hollow dot next to them. Even refreshing did not fix it and I had to relog it for it to start working.

GenosseFlosse@feddit.org · 1 pts · 41d

All the extra features that require extra Ram and CPU are there because someone requested it. Sure you can have your office 97 that runs on 16MB, but then you would not be able to embed your AutoCAD drawings, load data from an XML file on the Internet or other snazziness that 99% of users don't need.

Alexstarfire@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 41d (1 reply)

Then you should use a format and program that's less cumbersome. Word isn't Notepad. It's much more complex.

I don't even use Word. Wouldn't even if it opened instantaneously. But I sure as fuck not going to be worked up over something taking a few seconds to open.

huppakee@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 41d

They're not getting worked up, they're comparing apples and oranges

djmikeale@feddit.dk · 5 pts · 40d

After working a job in a place with no MS office suite, etc, I can attest that yes, you do grow extremely impatient. Now it takes me like 30 seconds to open Microsoft office - in my old job we'd use slack for most our communication and even when we'd open Gmail it would be 2-3 seconds. Markdown docs would open in less than a second. So after this job where everything was instant it was super frustrating to go back to Microsoft products. It's not only having to wait that's annoying, for me it's especially that I'm unable to stay in a state of flow.

finley@lemmy.zip · -26 pts · 41d (22 replies)
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impudentmortal@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 41d (18 replies)

What a dumb reason to quit a job lmao

finley@lemmy.zip · -10 pts · 40d (8 replies)

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been stupid enough to work for a company that uses Microsoft products.

Have you ever been that stupid?

halcyoncmdr@piefed.social · 6 pts · 40d (5 replies)

I’ve never been stupid enough to work for a company that uses Microsoft products.

finley@lemmy.zip · -5 pts · 40d (4 replies)

Don’t blame me because you have a shitty job.

halcyoncmdr@piefed.social · 2 pts · 40d (3 replies)

You're claiming to have NEVER worked at a company that uses ANY of these?

Half of their products are server-side and you'd never know you were using them as an end user. Unless you've literally never worked anywhere at all, that's extremely unlikely.

finley@lemmy.zip · -3 pts · 40d (2 replies)

I’ve been a freelancer since I graduated from design school.

I work for myself and choose my own software. If that’s so unbelievable to you, I don’t know what to tell you.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

halcyoncmdr@piefed.social · 1 pts · 40d

You work for yourself, not employed by another company.

So you are being disingenuous.

I think many (most?) would argue that is basically the same as lying about it.

impudentmortal@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 40d (1 reply)

I'm hoping you're still young so that you have more of a chance to mature. You're confusing necessity for stupidity and completely missing the fact that people need money to survive. My guess is that you grew up fairly wealthy so you never really had to consider that financial problems exist.

You even said something correct below in that avoiding the use of Microsoft is a privilege but I'm also guessing you don't realize exactly what that means. It doesn't make you intellectually superior to anyone, just that you're lucky you're in that position. Similar to how having enough money to not worry about grocery store prices or having no chronic diseases are privileges.

Part of being a good graphic designer is having enough empathy to connect with people so that your design goes through. Be better.

finley@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 40d

I’m old enough to recognize arrogant bullshit when I see it.

And your arrogant pretense betrays itself– – because either you had enough money to pay for that bullshit, or you’re just some jealous asshole who didn’t. otherwise, you wouldn’t be so angry, so bitter as to complain about it, about me here, decades later. zero cool

I got by by being clever enough to get what I needed without having to pay for it. And I don’t care whether or not you believe me. Because it happened. And here I am. and that’s all the proof I need to show. and I understand why you may resent me for that, you have absolutely zero right to judge me for it.

so fucking deal with it

mycodesucks@lemmy.world · -10 pts · 41d (8 replies)

Depends. I've happily turned down jobs that required me to use Windows and the amount of daily frustration I avoid as a result is worth every bit of the pickiness.

Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 6 pts · 40d (1 reply)

This sounds like you are privilaged

finley@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 40d

It is a privilege to not have to use Microsoft products

Syndication@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 41d (4 replies)
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Damage@feddit.it · 3 pts · 41d (3 replies)

I mean couldn’t you just use a virtual machine on Linux or MacOS if you needed to use it for work?

Most jobs require you to use a company-supplied machine. Where of course you can't swap operating systems.
People just put up with it even when they'd like alternatives, because it's just one of the unpleasant things we do to stay employed.

Syndication@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 41d (2 replies)
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GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 40d

Everyone above this comment was expressing frustration with using MS products. This doesn't go away with a VM and personal privacy has no bearing. I have a job that is computer-adjacent, and still use MS products enough to swear at them every day I work. As a former programmer, im not sure I'd want to get back to doing that full-time if I had to use other MS products more. I hear the coding stack is still exceptional.

mycodesucks@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 40d

It's just not worth it to me to wait several minutes for things to properly boot, be nagged with updates and aggravating messages, and then have my system start thrashing halfway through my day. I don't care how good the pay is - I don't use tools that will aggravate me. They can hire someone else.

mycodesucks@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 40d

Downvote all you like. I'm happy picking the jobs I want and don't have to maintain proficiency in a bad tool I hate using. You do you.

jtrek@startrek.website · 6 pts · 40d

don’t you have the choice to quit?

Many people can't comfortably quit their job. Not in the US. Finding a new job is difficult. Finding a new job that doesn't use Microsoft is even more of a long shot. Most people don't have the money sitting around to just coast without income for very long.

Edit: wow… So many people hate me because I don’t have to use. Shitty Microsoft products.

I don't think that's why you're being down voted. It's the "let them eat cake" attitude about people being stuck at shitty jobs, probably

ICastFist@programming.dev · 3 pts · 40d (1 reply)

"Look at me! I'm an entitled jerk who judges others based on their incapacity to leave jobs that use microsoft software!"

Shows how little you understand of the world.

finley@lemmy.zip · -3 pts · 40d
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