- Microsoft is working to make WinUI 3 speedier
- This is the contemporary framework for the user interface of the OS
- With WinUI 3 being employed more widely across Windows 11, and tweaked for better performance, it’s another key way in which the OS could be made faster
We’ve learned more about Microsoft‘s efforts to make Windows 11 faster, discovering another front that the company is working on to ensure the operating system becomes more performant in terms of core interface elements.
Windows Central reports that the big drive for better performance — which is part of the broader campaign to fix Windows 11 — doesn’t just involve transitioning elements of the Windows 11 interface to use WinUI 3, but actually speeding up WinUI itself.
For the uninitiated, WinUI refers to the contemporary framework for the user interface (UI) of Windows. It’s used by Microsoft for many of the core apps and elements of Windows 11, and can also be used by third-party software developers to make their own apps fit with the look and feel of the OS.
So, Microsoft is employing WinUI 3 in more places within Windows 11, but is also making it perform better, as software engineer Beth Pan makes clear in a post on GitHub, stating that: “Our mission is to make WinUI 3 the best native UI platform for Windows experiences and apps, and performance is at the heart of that effort.”
Pan adds: “Making this a reality means delivering performance improvements at multiple levels, including within WinUI itself.”
The software engineer further notes: “We’ve been zeroing in on launch time, using File Explorer and Notepad as our primary benchmarks, with an emphasis on improvements that broadly benefit most apps.”
Pan then breaks down some of the performance boosts that have been achieved so far with File Explorer, including 41% and 63% fewer allocations and transient allocations, respectively, as well as 45% fewer function calls — and a 25% reduction in the time spent in WinUI code.
Analysis: a long-term commitment for fundamentals and quality, we’re told
What does that mean in reality? Well, these changes are still very much in early development, and we don’t know what the mentioned improvements actually add up to in terms of making File Explorer launch faster. There’s no “it’ll be x seconds quicker” here (of course, launch times will naturally vary on different configurations of hardware, anyway).
However, the gist is clear — there’s a good deal of optimization work going on with core elements of Windows 11 along these lines, and it’s bound to help with performance. Especially given that this work isn’t happening in isolation.
Remember that Microsoft also has projects on the boil to improve File Explorer performance in various ways, and one of those is ‘Low Latency Profile‘. This is a recently revealed CPU trick that could be instrumental in making a whole lot of apps and Windows 11 interface elements operate a good deal more responsively.
Another heartening theme evident here is one of greater collaboration within Microsoft. Pan observes in the post: “The approach here is we do what we can from [the] framework side, and [obviously] other teams in Windows also investigated and [have] been doing work to improve overall launch perf, we connect/collaborate frequently to make sure the improvements will be end-to-end. It’s a long-term commitment for fundamentals and quality.”
This all sounds very positive for the future, and as someone else commenting on the GitHub post, claiming to be an ex-Microsoft employee, observes, “This was by far the most frustrating thing working with you guys, every team seemed to do their own thing. I hope you guys really push to fix that.”
Thus far, the scope of the Windows 11 revamp is laudably wide, so let’s hope the reality lives up to the promising early work we’re seeing and that Microsoft is indeed pulling together to work more effectively between its different Windows groups.
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