Start Is All Back

@thebookisclosed Community notes: StartIsBack used to have as-is Win7 menu in 2012. StartAllBack used to have as-is Win10 taskbar in 2021.

This dude's never-ending crusade to make shit up about how @StartIsBack used to work kills me.

@unixterminal Raspberry Pi with 4GB of RAM seems like fair target

@StartIsBack Sure, a 26-year-old standard is a great place to start. Just Pentium 133 or are you thinking support for Alpha too?

People making fun of the new Run dialog achieving 94ms, a 10% improvement over the legacy Run dialog, are the same people who would ==screaming== if the new Run dialog took 10% longer. You can't make these people happy. Ignore them.

@unixterminal MS promises less resource usage in Win11 future, so better standards would help.

@StartIsBack The standard is now Windows 2000?

@follwcoolpeople It couldn't. Unless they're counting classic as with animation and new one is without + already preloaded.

@StartIsBack but they said that it launched 1ms faster... how can that be....

Try typing \windows\winsxs\something in "modern" Run dialog

@ClintRutkas Absolutely incomprehensible amount of resources and technologies used and duplicated just to show an edit bar. Yeah you can be proud of 94ms of hot path...

Updating surfaces is tricky. We did the Run dialog. devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/th… ❤️ Terminal and PowerToys team.

look what they have to do to mimic the fraction of our power

Observe shellhost.exe CPU and RAM usage for extra feels

@cmuratori Classic Run dialog is instant since 1995. If it regressed to 100+ms it is due recent dark mode kludges and GDI regressions

I wanted to test this now-promulgated claim that "94ms time-to-show" - assuming that's accurate - would constitute Microsoft having "managed to improve the run prompt latency" that "nobody has had an issue with" in previous versions. On a 60fps* HDMI frame capture from my Windows 10 machine that's around a decade old (Intel i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz), there is one visible frame in between completing the click action and seeing a completely-drawn "run" dialog. The run dialog appears hollow for a single frame, then fills in (as shown). With just a capture, I can't tell if this is benefiting from a "hidden" extra frame of latency, because the Start Menu appears to take one extra frame to "disappear". One frame prior to the first one in the screenshot appears to have actually finished the click (the mouse cursor changed), but the Start Menu does an extra frame of color change on the text after that. Without looking at the code, I'm not sure whether to count that against "run" or against the Start Menu if we're being meticulous - and of course I don't know whether the "94 ms" (apparently median) time would have been counting that time or not. Either way, "94ms time-to-show" would clearly be a significant regression unless that number is measuring something very different from "response after completing the click on Run". The Windows 10 version on 9-year-old hardware appears to be responding within either ~33ms or 50ms depending on how you count the frames. Normally, I would now say "this means, best case, it will feel like a 30fps experience," but we all know how that would go. Apparently it is just horribly nefarious and misleading to tell people an equivalent FPS number to help them gauge the responsiveness of an interactive program in a casual tweet you make on social media. Of course, please note that I am not measuring total physical latency here (like mouse-to-event or submission-to-display) latency here, as I assume the originally quoted "94ms" was not measuring those things either. Either way, once there is a wide-release version of the new Run dialog, it will be easy enough to test if it has improved or not by running like-for-like captures, which I cannot do here because I don't have the new purportedly-faster version. * I apologize profusely for using the term "60fps" to specify the rate at which these frames were captured so you could have a reference for their temporal spacing. I realize that it is highly misleading to use FPS, especially when looking at only 2 frames. I should clearly have said "on a 16.66666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666 millisecond per frame capture", so that everyone would much better intuitive understanding of what was going on.

@phantomofearth It was always possible to specify any pause date in registry

Latest episode of news sites dropping not very good headlines: betanews.com/article/micros… No. Just no. The ability to pause updates has been a thing for years, what do you mean "introducing a way to pause updates".

There was a regression with 3.9.18/.19 which crashed with early 24H2 builds. If you're not into Windows Updates, better sit on 23H2 😓

@winaero 👀

I remember good ol' days when we had 98Lite, a nice app that could downgrade Windows 98's bloated shell down to Windows 95's one without IE integration. Windows 11 desperately needs such a tool to make it sane again without all the bloatware crap and barely usable shell.

@kukmikuk 3.9.18

@StartIsBack Explorer on 26200.7296...

Next step: EU mandate for movable taskbars🤔

So long, Windows 10. Thanks for being an ok-ish operating system.

@thebookisclosed There’s no code in the build ikr

I really hope that the enablement method just happens to be obscure and that the release notes aren't lying.. again. The "next few flights" will tell.

@orso75io Support email is startisback@gmail.com

@StartIsBack Hi, I formatted my PC and reinstalled StartAllBack on Windows 11 24/7 but when I insert the license it gives me an activation server error. I don't understand why.

Looks like the most overengineered dark mode Win32 common controls are coming in Canary at least

@rpodric Ahaha NO

@StartIsBack Unsure what that means, but as long as it makes for a way that all existing Windows pieces (Properties, Dev Man, anything using MMC, etc) and dialogs in a huge swath of existing non-MS programs can automatically be dark, I'll be happy,

Code to interact with comctlV7 was removed from latest canary 😅