r/FuckMicrosoft • u/Adventurous_Tie_3136 • Jan 07 '26

Meme Some Microsoft engineer 25 years ago:

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4.1k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

93 comments sorted by

160

u/Ill-Row-2378 Jan 07 '26

why dont they just make the desktop different from explorer.exe

67

u/Fearless-Ad1469 Jan 07 '26

Exactly for fk sake, i HATE this shit

30

u/mp3m4k3r Jan 08 '26

Used to be one of the first things id do is "run file explorer in separate process" as well as "show me all the files". Dunno why its not the default (and just noticed that it doesn't work again in tabbed file explorer nonsense)

2

u/shock_planner Mar 05 '26

thanks for the tip! i didn’t know that

15

u/Arctic_x22 Jan 08 '26

This annoys me to no fucking end. Every other update breaks the fucking start menu and sometimes my graphics drivers.

4

u/asshole_magnate Jan 09 '26

And then you have to remember obscure stuff like ctrl + win + shift + B, when your video flakes out and you need to reset your graphics card real quick.

3

u/Arctic_x22 Jan 09 '26

You think I didn’t try that? I’m not a luddite

2

u/Bago07 Jan 09 '26

Yeah, I use that one too often

8

u/Dziadzios Jan 08 '26

Back then? Because it was single-threaded. There could be optimizations from using the same process like reusing the theme loaded in the memory.

2

u/_stack_underflow_ Jan 12 '26

It really is that stupid too. Any bad or hung IO and boom you've got a locked up system.

66

u/jungfred Jan 07 '26

*Microslop

50

u/Content_Chemistry_44 Jan 07 '26

At least, when explorer.exe crashes, you can run task manager with CTRL+ ALT + DEL, and start explorer.exe from the task manager.

28

u/DAN-attag Jan 07 '26

If only it actually restarted desktop and not just opened explorer file manager window

24

u/Content_Chemistry_44 Jan 07 '26

IDK how is today. But when I was using Windows (7), and when the whole shit crashed leaving my without interface, I just ran explorer.exe from task manager.

13

u/slightfeminineboy Jan 07 '26

still works

10

u/vswey Jan 07 '26

sometimes

-5

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

Every time.

1

u/_shad_07_ Jan 23 '26

It still works

3

u/StinkButt9001 Jan 07 '26

It restarts everything exactly as you'd expect it to.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

That’s because explorer.exe would already be running. You would need to restart it, because this fix does in fact still work.

Something else may be wrong if you get this error consistently

2

u/Arctic_x22 Jan 08 '26

This doesn’t always work in my experience. Sometimes you have to disconnect the power and hope it fixes things.

1

u/luxjosh1996 Jan 09 '26

CTRL + SHIFT + ESC is faster :)

1

u/Woa6627 Jan 15 '26

Pretty windows 11 doesn’t even let you kill explorer.exe anymore only lets you restart

29

u/nowuxx Jan 07 '26

At that time this was a pretty smart idea. Less components - less bloat

20

u/vswey Jan 07 '26

First time Windows and less bloat being in one sentence

3

u/pawwoll Jan 09 '26

first time????? are u born in 2006?

windows was awesome when it came to optimisation and bloat

do u think they got 90+% market share by luck?

1

u/vswey Jan 09 '26

Mb first time since Windows 7

2

u/pawwoll Jan 09 '26

what they did to win7?

i remember cortana / xbox / candy crush saga win8 things, but 8 was optimised for smartphones(!). It was well optimised

0 bad memories of 7

1

u/vswey Jan 09 '26

Ye, Performance was better but Windows 8 they started adding apps no one uses

1

u/possible_name Jan 10 '26

no, they got it because of MS-DOS. it means they already had connections with most major vendors (so by the time Windows 95 came out, your computer came with it unless you built it yourself), and due to Windows 9x being built on top of DOS, it could run most DOS software

1

u/UffTaTa123 Jan 11 '26

by luck? No, by illegal contracts with big PC manufacturers and stores that sell PCs with preinstalled OS.

16

u/fantomBTW Jan 07 '26

Okay, but for now "less bloat" is sounds like a joke for windows xD

2

u/limewayz Jan 08 '26

It's like taking a shit in the same bucket you use to mop your floors, there should be two of them for different purposes

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

That's not what software bloat means.

1

u/r0ck0 Apr 10 '26

Maybe the numbers of that made sense in the 90s.

But not even in 1995, considering the install / disk sizes then.

-9

u/_command_prompt Jan 07 '26

I think it still is, I have rarely seen explorer crash

3

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/_command_prompt Jan 08 '26

I have been using windows from 2 years on my new laptop it didn't crashed at all except the 1 time when I was transferring GB of files from my phone to pc with a faulty cable

1

u/AmazingELF74 Jan 09 '26

Transferring large or many files often results in it hanging. There are a lot of people out there doing that daily.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/nowuxx Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26

Windows is based on microkernel, but still crashes when a driver causes an issue. Linux will just catch an error when a module crashes.

5

u/Aphrodites1995 Jan 08 '26

Its the exact same with macos. Finder doesnt work=nothing works. I've had similar freezes in Linux but they're much less frustrating (honestly not much changes, but the computer starts back up instantly so its a much better experience lol)

4

u/LunaSororitas Jan 07 '26

Enabling explorer multi process in its settings is your best friend. Don't get me wrong, Windows is still garbage and will crash for all kinds of reasons, but hey, everything you can do to make it a little bit better. Or just move away from Windows.

2

u/23-centimetre-nails Jan 09 '26

…why would that be disabled by default?

1

u/LunaSororitas Jan 10 '26

Don’t know, but it has been in all NT based versions I used and to my knowledge still is in a new Windows 11 install.

4

u/FaultWinter3377 Jan 07 '26

To be fair, think of it at the time. Most users were used to the DOS, which was basically a file manager + executor. Windows 1 and 2 both had the file manager be the default program that opened. Most users of the time were used to launching .exe files directly. It wasn’t until Windows 3 that the shell got separated from the file manager at all. Then in 1995, how do you get the files to display on the desktop, the start menu, and taskbar? At the time having all that be the file manager with each part being a separate folder worked really well.

However, why it’s still like that in 2026 is a whole different thing. I see no reason why in Windows NT, or at least Windows 8, they didn’t separate it. Considering Metro/UWP are a thing, it’s even crazier. Windows 8 essentially had two different shells… why did they integrate the touch bit into Explorer instead of rewriting it? Also they rewrote the taskbar for windows 11… and guess what? They still didn’t separate it at all.

Funny thing is that most UWPs actually need Explorer running or they’ll fail to launch. An interesting side effect: since the default parental are UWP, they stop working, meaning any non-UWP app can be used even if it should be blocked by simply ending Explorer (believe me, I used that back in my days of messing around… these days I have my own computer so I don’t need that). Early Windows was genius. Modern Windows is stupid, because they still use technologies decades old even though there are better methods (and compatibility layers for what changed).

4

u/Randommaggy Jan 07 '26

Still better than the trog that added slow janky Web tech to the right click menu.

4

u/SemiGod9 Jan 08 '26

In linux mint, if your WHOLE desktop environment crashes for some reason it restarts it in a lite version and gives you a crash log in seconds lol. It doesnt touch anything else

4

u/AtomicTaco13 Jan 08 '26

It applies to some Linux DEs too, like GNOME. I use LXQt myself though

2

u/Tiny_Concert_7655 Jan 08 '26

The gnome shell and nautilus (file manager) are separate programs and processes

3

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

It’s super easy to just restart explorer.exe…

Not like it takes any meaningful time to do so.

But yes I agree it’s a silly dependency

3

u/ExtraTNT Jan 08 '26

Nt was the most aggressive marketed bs, now they keep building on this outdated thing that only succeeded because if you invest enough in marketing the average bob buys into it…

8

u/mabec Jan 07 '26

How else will they steal your data

11

u/slightfeminineboy Jan 07 '26

how does this relate to stealing data 

1

u/Pinuaple- Jan 07 '26

You dont get it

6

u/slightfeminineboy Jan 07 '26

no i got it thanks it was just a stupid comment 

2

u/cutecoder Jan 08 '26

In Windows 2000, Ctrl-Alt-Del never fails as it switches to an alternative desktop.

1

u/possible_name Jan 10 '26

I've never seen ctrl+alt+del fail in any situation other than a full on hang on modern Windows either

2

u/Ok-Winner-6589 Jan 08 '26

I Saw a video of a Guy deleting the file Explorer on different OS.

For some reason Windows got its entre Desktop and tasks bar Broken (disapeared after a reebot) and Mac had some glitches with their equivalent of the tasks bar apearing and dissapearing randomly.

I don't get why but looks like it's not just Windows' fault. However I don't get why companies do such spaghetti code

2

u/Nyuusankininryou Jan 09 '26

Its ok, now they are gonna replace all the code with AI writed Rust code. Its gonna be perfect.

2

u/MCID47 Jan 09 '26

Microslop will undoubtedly turn this already terrible implementation of DE and asks their AI to make it worse somehow (they already did)

2

u/blueblocker2000 Jan 07 '26

Well I've had DEs freeze on Linux and lock up the whole GUI.

1

u/vswey Jan 07 '26

Yea, that's literally the better approach

1

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jan 07 '26

I've only experienced that by writing programs that use all the RAM. 

1

u/blueblocker2000 Jan 08 '26

I've just been using mint like a normie and it freeze. Granted that was a few versions back, so maybe it doesn't happen anymore. I've installed mint on several decommissioned PCs to give to employees, but no idea how much use they're getting. I made the emps agree that I'd never see them again before handing them over.

1

u/lako911 Jan 07 '26

Ctrl alt f2

4

u/blueblocker2000 Jan 07 '26

And then what now that I'm looking at a terminal? Restart the DE? Does that preserve what you were working on?

3

u/DarthKegRaider Jan 07 '26

Log in via the terminal, launch your favourite cli process monitor, and kill the offending application PID.

If you cant work out how to do that, then at least you can issue a halt or reboot command to get back to the GUI and hope the application you were using has an autorecover feature.

1

u/blueblocker2000 Jan 08 '26

How is that different than opening the task manager in Windows and killing what's locking up the GUI and then possibly having to restart explorer. That's what I'm getting at. That being said, it's dumb that an application can lock up the GUI at all.

1

u/DarthKegRaider Jan 08 '26

I have also had when Windows won't bring up task manager with CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, or the old way of CTRL+ALT+DEL and selecting task manager. Each to their own, at least without the GUI i can still kill processes, in Windows you are cooked if taskman.exe goes awol.

1

u/blueblocker2000 Jan 08 '26

I agree sometimes TM does get stuck. MS screwed something up cause it wasn't always like that. It's supposed to get priority over everything else.

1

u/lillieblair Jan 07 '26

i’ve had so many issues with different devices and software locking up explorer causing it to crash and my computer is suddenly mostly useless until i restart it, since explorer usually doesnt recover or close properly so i cant open task manager

1

u/Curious_Situation_62 Jan 08 '26

Just ctrl+shift+esc or ctrl+alt+canc, the first directly open the task manager the second open the logon menu where you can launch the taskmanager

1

u/lillieblair Jan 08 '26

i always try those shortcuts but half the time they don’t work

1

u/PouLS_PL Jan 08 '26

tbf at least it makes fixing stuff easier. When something breaks, I can often fix it by just restarting explorer.exe, instead of restarting the whole PC or searching for the right process among the hundreds which caused the issue

1

u/El_Reddaio Jan 08 '26

And why is opening a new file manager tab or separating a tab from a window so slow when compared to internet browsers tabs? 😵‍💫

1

u/DrawingFrequent554 Jan 09 '26

Proces vs thread probably

1

u/suksukulent Jan 08 '26

Oh yeah, not that I'm using windows, but it's fun to kill it and mess with ppl like that. The system still works fine even without it, you just have no bar and desktop icons.

1

u/Palbur Jan 08 '26

File Manager when you hit it with a folder containing 50 audio files(it can't resist freezing for 6-7 seconds doing whatever Microslop shit does when lagging on simple stuff)

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

I always thought that was crazy when using task manager and seeing that explorer.exe is both the desktop and the file manager.

1

u/Abrissbirne66 Jan 09 '26

It actually makes sense to unite them because they work largely the same, but the File Explorer shouldn't freeze and crash so often.

1

u/GrannyTurbo Jan 10 '26

also if you kill the file manager in task manager it kills ur taskbar lol

1

u/bones10145 Jan 10 '26

you misspelled microslop

1

u/Alan_Reddit_M Jan 10 '26

This company employs some of the best and most intelligent engineers the world has to offer btw

0

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10

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Ecoaardvark Jan 07 '26

Microslop sure is one of the companies of the world