Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance
Mood
informative
Sentiment
neutral
Category
news
Key topics
Windows 11
File Explorer
Microsoft
Performance Optimization
Discussion Activity
Moderate engagementFirst comment
1h
Peak period
7
Hour 3
Avg / period
4.3
Based on 26 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 23, 2025 at 8:33 AM EST
18h ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 23, 2025 at 9:46 AM EST
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
7 comments in Hour 3
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 23, 2025 at 6:01 PM EST
8h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
This shit crashes all the time in our office workflow, hard restarting explorer process. USB issues, soft freezing on certain types of file transfer.
Mapping drives and credentials integration have been bugged as fuck for at least 3 years. I shouldn’t have to edit every connection in our office in credential manager to fix this.
And anything happening with the explorer process is infuriating to try and diagnose. It almost never throws an error code or event code when it fucks up. So good luck trying to fix it yourself.
They’re making poor choices because there was a major shift to incompetence. Using web technologies on the desktop when we as engineers know it was birthed as a whack-a-mole hack job that continues today as a accumulation of human-centric decisions not computing (engineered) 1s.
Applications really don’t need such flexibility to look (ie. dom), they need to function and cohabitate to be resourceful, which clearly they’re not.
And that’s not to say engineers haven’t tried to fix those mistakes but the catalyst was already set.
Design should have never taken precedence over compute, just as much as interpreted/runtime over compiled. They need to be balanced if not swayed back.
We still have the capability to learn the machine and shift the narrative as long as we’re willing to lose the brand for the generic. That’s the biggest obstacle because we sell out to the language, the architecture, etc. by the marketing of efficiencies in time to create rather than compute and each iteration of that deteriorates the experience and the art.
Anything that WinRT touches, after the Project Reunion was announced back in 2020, has been a mess, and they keep pushing it.
Unfortunately some of the newer APIs, like Windows ML, are only available in WinRT components.
If this was possible, along with an update system that doesn't bring down even the "server" version of the OS, it would be essentially production ready.
Again, this was a hack. They should really be looking at fixing the issues with the startup time and slow performance of explorer, because even on vastly lesser machines, we've had near-to-instant startup times with, effectively, the same application.
This only goes to show how poorly staffed, like in developer skills, the whole Windows team is nowadays.
Just watch the WinUI community calls and the related discussion on the Github projects (WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C+++/WinRT).
In what regards Windows development experience, we really miss the Steve Balmer era.
Only File Explorer ? They shall preload everything in Win 11. /s
That's when I personally discovered modern Windows is more or less fundamentally broken, and probably already was when Windows 10 was released (11 is still basically 10, by the way, look at the build number).
Also, it's amazing to discover how ridiculously fast "old" hardware still is in 2025 just by installing a non-Windows OS.
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.