If you’ve ever tried right-clicking on a file or folder in File Explorer, or scrolling through a series of folder layers, you’ve probably noticed that the performance isn’t great. File Explorer feels slow, sometimes taking seconds to appear when you click on the right-click menu.
Well, good news. Microsoft is aware of these issues and has promised to address them as part of this year Fix quality issues in Windows with greater effort.
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- Significantly lower latency for search, navigation and context menus
- Transferring and transferring large files will be faster and more reliable
- Faster startup and responsiveness for common file tasks
Microsoft has already been testing some performance improvements for File Explorer with Windows Insiders for the past few months, including the ability to preload File Explorer in the background so that it launches immediately when you click an icon.
Now the company is adding more improvements that will make using File Explorer feel fast and easy to use. It never makes sense to me that clicking through multiple folder trees always takes a second to load content within a folder. It just needs to open right away and it sounds like it will open soon.
Having a more responsive right-click menu would also be a huge improvement. I almost always have to wait two clicks between right-clicking and seeing the right-click menu in File Explorer, even on high-end systems. This gets worse depending on the type of file you’re right-clicking on and how many programs you’ve installed that appear in that menu.
In addition to improving File Explorer’s performance and functionality, Microsoft has also confirmed that it’s working to fix the inconsistent UI issues that have plagued File Explorer for years. The company says it’s working to reduce UI judder when in dark mode, and will also make dark mode more compatible in older interfaces within File Explorer.
💬 What do you think of these File Explorer improvements?
Since Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into improving quality in Windows 11 this year, I want to know what you think about these File Explorer improvements in particular. Does File Explorer need this, or should Microsoft try to rebuild File Explorer from scratch with a modern codebase instead of optimizing this old experience. Let us know in the comments.
