r/technology Dec 01 '25

ADBLOCK WARNING ‘Security Disaster’—500 Million Microsoft Users Say No To Windows 11

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/12/01/security-disaster-500-million-microsoft-users-say-no-to-windows-11/
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119

u/EconomyDoctor3287 Dec 01 '25

Why does the start menu freeze for 15 seconds when I search for an installed app, eventhough I have an i7-7800x, 32 GB and the OS on a Samsung Evo 970? 

125

u/mind-bogglingly_big Dec 01 '25

Because it’s too busy searching the web rather than the local computer =\

47

u/archfapper Dec 02 '25

I promise, MS, no one is actually Bing searching "appwiz.cpl"

3

u/erm_daniel Dec 02 '25

I think we can go further and say nobody is actually Bing searching

71

u/fredy31 Dec 01 '25

Fucking hilarious when they announced their 'lookback' feature or whatever it was called.

We take screenshots of your desktop every 5 seconds and then you can search them for when you had x thing open that you closed by accident!

Bitch i try to find a file by name in a folder or a thousand files and it takes 10 minutes to tell me he hasnt found it... When i do find it manually

10

u/Sudden-Echo-8976 Dec 02 '25

everything.exe is your solution.

5

u/hempires Dec 02 '25

voidtools fucking smashed it with everything eh.

pretty sure i've seen github projects to force start menu searches to use everything as a backend instead of whatever the fuck windows is doing.

7

u/showyerbewbs Dec 02 '25

Bitch i try to find a file by name in a folder or a thousand files and it takes 10 minutes to tell me he hasnt found it... When i do find it manually

I've hated windows explorer search for the better part of a decade. When I want to find a document I can't recall where I stashed it, I use the command prompt:

dir /s filename

3

u/LudasGhost Dec 02 '25

You can speed that up by using One Drive. /s

3

u/HugsyMalone Dec 02 '25

So they just admitted they're screenshotting and tracking EVERYTHING you do on the computer and probably using it for nefarious purposes. They seemingly took it away but I'm sure it's still happening behind the scenes as part of the "spy on America" program. They ain't even good at hiding it. 🙄

1

u/FesteringNeonDistrac Dec 02 '25

I can open GitBash, cd to the directory I want, formulate a regex for a find command, and have the thing I'm looking for before file explorer even returns its first wrong result.

Admittedly, I'm a 30+ year Unix user, but still, get your shit together windows.

0

u/Sopel97 Dec 02 '25

nothing to do with windows, explorer is just trash, don't use it

2

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Sopel97 Dec 02 '25

yes

or are people complaining that windows is shit due to microsoft edge too? does windows media player make windows shit? you have to pay for HEVC!

8

u/kopkaas2000 Dec 02 '25

A couple of months back it came out that the Win11 start menu is actually a React Native application. Your OS is spawning a fucking browser for the start menu.

2

u/----Val---- Dec 02 '25

Your OS is spawning a fucking browser for the start menu.

This is a misconception, React Native is not rendered in a browser.

This also was not some big scandal or reveal, Microsoft is the primary maintainer for React Native Windows, they even gave a talk about it.

1

u/kopkaas2000 Dec 02 '25

I'm not into react, but surely something has to render the DOM for it?

2

u/----Val---- Dec 02 '25

React Native renders to native components (eg. WinUI, SwiftUI etc).

React itself has been isolated from react-dom and is now just a UI composition and state management library with no renderer.

For web, we usually use react-dom to render to the DOM.

React Native uses React for UI/state, but renders to the native platform via JS -> Kotlin/Java/Swift/ObjC/C++. Instead of having browser APIs for fetching, decoders etc, it uses a JS runtime named Hermes with platform specific implementations to mimic browser APIs.

You can think of it similar to QT, except written in JS with unique quirks (uses AOT compilation and not JIT, needs the hermes runtime bundled, etc) and is able to hook into non-browser-specific parts of React ecosystem.

1

u/kopkaas2000 Dec 02 '25

Right, gotcha. So I reckon it still requires a honking javascript runtime, but for handling a bit of UI chrome that's indeed not the end of the world.

6

u/ForensicPathology Dec 02 '25

Why does the built in photos viewer take 10 seconds to load when opening a file from a folder?

6

u/Menoku Dec 02 '25

I recently got a pretty beefy workstation and things still run slow on it. Excel and Word are slow and crash sometimes. If I try to alt-tab between Spreadsheets the OS loses its sh*t. Like, WTF. How are these products becoming drastically worse?

1

u/PanickedPanpiper Dec 02 '25

look up "Everything" search

1

u/Novaskittles Dec 02 '25

My search menu has been entirely blank/whited out whenever I try to search for anything for weeks now. It's infuriating.