Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.
What happened to alternate shells? It's still possible to change the environment launch app in environmental variables, but I haven't seen a different start menu or shell since around Win7 days.
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.
The slow consistent degeneration of file explorer, the primary core service for users in the entire OS, is truly a sign of the times at Msoft.
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.
Try dragging a file and accidentally hovering over an unavailable network drive. Explorer will freeze for 5+ minutes with no timeout or cancel option. The entire UI locks up while it waits for a TCP timeout on an obviously unreachable resource. Been reported since Windows XP, still not fixed.
Lay-off the engineers and promote the mouthpieces. It’s not a Microsoft issue, it’s an industry 1.
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.
When the WinUI marketing team says it is now used on application XYZ, which now includes Explorer, it doesn't have the effect among Windows developer community that they think it is.
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.
25H2 is better than previous versions, where I used Beyond Compare to do file copies because explorer.exe would crash, corrupting the copy. Still needs a lot of work to improve reliability.
between w10 and w11 they even changed some parts off how bat scripts works too, just basic scripts that work in w10 explorer dont work in w11. I had few issues. Total mess and bad product
After booting up the Linux kernel my current PC (Broadwell-E i7, Geforce 1080, built in 2016!) will launch into Hyprland with all necessary services running, Zen with about 20-30 open tabs and VSCodium with last nights hacking project still open and ready to go in less than 30 milliseconds or so.
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.
The fact they're resorting to hacks like this to resolve problems is just pathetic. I say pathetic because MS is a trillion-dollar company -- they have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not knuckling down and fixing these problems permanently. All preloading it does is kick the can down the road. Then again, this is Ms we're talking about, so I'm not at all surprised they would do something like this. I wonder if anyone there even knows how explorer even works anymore.
Microsoft has no idea how screwed they are long term yet. Demand for alternative cloud and OS providers keeps rising and rising but I bet they think nothing will come of it.
I decided there won't be Windows device in my home anymore. If it turns out I can't do some stuff on Linux or Windows VM, I'm willing to give my money to Apple, Nintendo or Sony, even though I consider(ed) them worse then MS, and I hate their UI and policies. But at least they've been doing the same (bad) things for decades, while MS has no idea what they want and what users want from them. Or worse - they know but still insist on giving us all this cr*p
Yeah, same with OpenOffice for years. It was a hack to get the program already resident in memory and ameliorate some of the startup costs.
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.
What the hell is even going on at Microsoft these days? I'm genuinely surprised they don't have enough collective brainpower left to realize how bad this situation is.
They just don't care. Fixing bugs does not generate revenue. The customers are all captured in the Microsoft echosystem so that any migration will hurt.
Using File Pilot [0] really drives home how abysmally slow explorer.exe has become.
[0] https://filepilot.tech/
Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.
[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au
What happened to alternate shells? It's still possible to change the environment launch app in environmental variables, but I haven't seen a different start menu or shell since around Win7 days.
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.
The support has been mostly removed as far as I can tell.
Check out StartAllBack. Not fully new shell but fixes most issues.
This isn't a fix, it's a lazy bandaid.
at least on some versions of 11 (tested on LTSC (24H2)) is still possible to have the w10 file explorer - with hacks...-
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/restore-classic-file-explorer-...
The slow consistent degeneration of file explorer, the primary core service for users in the entire OS, is truly a sign of the times at Msoft.
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.
Try dragging a file and accidentally hovering over an unavailable network drive. Explorer will freeze for 5+ minutes with no timeout or cancel option. The entire UI locks up while it waits for a TCP timeout on an obviously unreachable resource. Been reported since Windows XP, still not fixed.
Does enabling the setting "Launch folder windows in a separate process" fix the problem?
Lay-off the engineers and promote the mouthpieces. It’s not a Microsoft issue, it’s an industry 1.
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.
When the WinUI marketing team says it is now used on application XYZ, which now includes Explorer, it doesn't have the effect among Windows developer community that they think it is.
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.
25H2 is better than previous versions, where I used Beyond Compare to do file copies because explorer.exe would crash, corrupting the copy. Still needs a lot of work to improve reliability.
between w10 and w11 they even changed some parts off how bat scripts works too, just basic scripts that work in w10 explorer dont work in w11. I had few issues. Total mess and bad product
Have they considered fixing it by adding Copilot to it? /s
After booting up the Linux kernel my current PC (Broadwell-E i7, Geforce 1080, built in 2016!) will launch into Hyprland with all necessary services running, Zen with about 20-30 open tabs and VSCodium with last nights hacking project still open and ready to go in less than 30 milliseconds or so.
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.
The fact they're resorting to hacks like this to resolve problems is just pathetic. I say pathetic because MS is a trillion-dollar company -- they have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not knuckling down and fixing these problems permanently. All preloading it does is kick the can down the road. Then again, this is Ms we're talking about, so I'm not at all surprised they would do something like this. I wonder if anyone there even knows how explorer even works anymore.
Agreed, explorer got slower after they added WinUI stuff into it.
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.
Microsoft has no idea how screwed they are long term yet. Demand for alternative cloud and OS providers keeps rising and rising but I bet they think nothing will come of it.
I decided there won't be Windows device in my home anymore. If it turns out I can't do some stuff on Linux or Windows VM, I'm willing to give my money to Apple, Nintendo or Sony, even though I consider(ed) them worse then MS, and I hate their UI and policies. But at least they've been doing the same (bad) things for decades, while MS has no idea what they want and what users want from them. Or worse - they know but still insist on giving us all this cr*p
Ofcourse they do. It is why they gave Windows 11 away for Windows 10 users.
I seem to recall a discussion about MS doing the same thing with Office years ago. This came up within the last several months on this site.
Yeah, same with OpenOffice for years. It was a hack to get the program already resident in memory and ameliorate some of the startup costs.
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.
How is that going to help? It's still dog slow even after running all day.
It's a file explorer - Please Microsoft...
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011569
What the hell is even going on at Microsoft these days? I'm genuinely surprised they don't have enough collective brainpower left to realize how bad this situation is.
They just don't care. Fixing bugs does not generate revenue. The customers are all captured in the Microsoft echosystem so that any migration will hurt.
[dead]
> Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance
Only File Explorer ? They shall preload everything in Win 11. /s