- Microsoft is working on making WinUI 3 faster
- This is the modern framework for the operating system’s user interface
- As WinUI 3 becomes more widely used across Windows 11 and tweaked for better performance, it’s another important way to speed up the operating system
We’ve learned more about Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 11 faster, and we’ve discovered another front the company is working on to make the operating system more performant in terms of core interface elements.
Windows Central reports that the major performance effort — which is part of the broader campaign to fix Windows 11 — involves not only transitioning elements of the Windows 11 interface to use WinUI 3, but actually speeding up WinUI itself.
For the uninitiated, WinUI refers to the modern framework for the user interface (UI) of Windows. It is 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 match the look and feel of the OS.
So Microsoft is applying WinUI 3 in more places in Windows 11, but also making it perform better, as software engineer Beth Pan makes clear in a post on GitHub that says: “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 in the WinUI itself.”
The software engineer further notes, “We zeroed 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 gains 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 time spent in WinUI code.
Analysis: a long-term commitment to fundamentals and quality, we’re told
What does it really mean? 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 faster” here (of course, launch times will vary on different configurations of hardware, anyway).
But the gist is clear – there’s a lot of optimization work going on with core elements in Windows 11 along these lines, and it’s bound to help performance. Especially considering that this work is not done in isolation.
Remember that Microsoft also has projects underway to improve File Explorer performance in various ways, and one of them is the ‘Low Latency Profile’. This is a newly revealed CPU trick that could be instrumental in making a whole lot of apps and Windows 11 interface elements work a lot more responsively.
Another encouraging theme evident here is greater collaboration within Microsoft. Pan notes in the post, “The approach here is that we do what we can [the] frame side, and [obviously] other teams in Windows also investigated and [have] work to improve the overall launch perf, we connect/collaborate frequently to ensure that the improvements will be end-to-end. It’s a long-term commitment to fundamentals and quality.”
It all sounds very positive for the future, and as another commenter on the GitHub post, claiming to be a former Microsoft employee, notes: “This was by far the most frustrating thing to work with you guys, each team seemed to be doing their own thing. I hope you guys really push to fix it.”
So far, the scope of the Windows 11 revamp is commendably broad, so let’s hope that reality lives up to the promising early work we’re seeing, and that Microsoft is actually pulling together to work more efficiently between its various Windows groups.
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