200-250 milliseconds
Get a move on Microsoft, we’ve already wasted 250 milliseconds!
How long it takes taskbar Jump Lists to appear
What are they?
Right-click an icon on your Windows taskbar. See the menu of options that appears? That’s a jump list – so named because it ‘jumps’ from the icon (as in our main screenshot). However, according to one Google employee these lists don’t so much jump as stagger.
Why’s that?
They take far too long to pop up. Bruce Dawson, a developer on Chrome, has complained to Microsoft that there’s a delay of 200 to 250 milliseconds (ms) between the mouse button being pressed and the menu appearing.
Isn’t that still very fast?
Yes. One millisecond is a thousandth of a second, so 250 milliseconds is a quarter of a second. In everyday life, that feels fairly quick. But it’s still enough time for Usain Bolt to run 8.6 feet, for the amethyst woodstar hummingbird to beat its wings 20 times, and for 567,998 emails to be sent worldwide. More importantly though, it’s also the average time humans respond to visual stimulus.
So what’s the problem?
Humans react faster to other types of stimuli. For audio, it’s 170ms, while for touch (such as clicking a mouse) it’s a mere 150ms. But even that’s too slow for Bruce. He expects Windows menus to appear “visually instantaneously”, which means ideally in 50ms, but “certainly less than 100ms”. Writing on Github ( www. snipca.com/35866), Microsoft’s online community for software developers, he claims the current speed of up to 250ms is “well beyond the ideal human interaction times and is a constant frustration”. He’s clearly a busy man because he doesn’t want to “wait for my computer, especially when doing simple and repetitive actions that I know it should be able to do roughly 10 times faster”.
Maybe he was just using a slow computer?
Apparently not. It had a speedy processor, 2GB of memory and a 2TB SSD. He had also disabled Windows animations so he was “presumably getting the best-case performance”.
What are animations?
Fleeting visual effects that Microsoft adds to Windows to make it feel easier to use. Here’s an example: open a Word document, then minimise it by clicking the top-right horizontal line. You’ll see a brief animation that shows the document whooshing down to the taskbar. Turn off animations and you won’t see this effect – your document will just vanish, without appearing to ‘go’ anywhere.
Does turning off animations make your computer faster?
Very, very slightly, but then as we’ve seen every millisecond counts to people like Bruce. To disable them, open Settings (press Windows key+i) then click ‘Ease of Access’. Scroll down to the ‘Simplify and Personalize Windows’ heading and turn off the ‘Show Animations in Windows’ slider. For most people though, keeping animations on or off is more a matter of taste than speed.
How quick was Microsoft’s response to Bruce’s complaint?
Not quite as fast as 250ms, but it has at least acknowledged the problem, saying that “with proper caching and SSDS, and on modern hardware” Jump Lists should appear near instantaneously. Microsoft says it’ll comment again after its developers investigate and “solidify” their findings (whatever that means).
Will that keep Bruce happy?
We doubt it. He probably spends his lunch hour trying to shave milliseconds off his reaction time using this online test: www.snipca.com/35872. He wouldn’t approve of our best score - a leisurely 244ms (see screenshot left). Perhaps he’s hoping for a change of career, aiming for the 100ms you’d need to be a fighter pilot or Formula One driver. It would surely beat being a software developer.