this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Despite Microsoft's push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant's latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.

This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.

The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.

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[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

It’s just a hunch, but my suspicion is it’s already capturing a lot of data for Recall to process later after it’s launched.

I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation for the severe performance decrease on Windows 11.

[–] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think it's simpler than that.

I think Windows 11 feels unresponsive because of how many features have Internet-enabled features built deep into them. All those little delays opening menus, etc, I think are actually network delay, so the little ads or other stuff have time to fetch and load and show simultaneously with the rest of the UI. Meaning the UI itself has to be delayed slightly to make it less obvious what's being fed to you from online vs local.

Nothing makes my Windows 11 PC shit the bed harder than an unreliable or interrupted Internet connection. Literally crashing the whole PC sometimes.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Could be they already have their servers processing the data, and Recall is just their effort to offload the processing cost to the end user.

Or it’s just straight up spying.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They 100% are spying and not even hiding it. That isnt what makes a system laggy though as its just a background process snitching on you once and hour or so.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Walk me through that thinking. You believe constantly capturing screen grabs/key presses/file content/etc, processing it, packaging it, and sending to the home servers would have no impact on system resources?

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

its not grabbing screen grabs and and key presses as you do them, its logging things that you interact with in the background and then packaging that up as a telemetry package to asynchronously send off to a server.

No it doesnt have no impact on resources but it negligable compared to what the previous poster mentioned about making everything dependent on network services and introducing latency that way.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You should read up on Recall. It is openly designed to use screen grabs. And my suspicion is they’re already collecting the data for it.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes I am aware of recall, and that it is only available on specific AI focused PCs (copilot+). Dont get me wrong its a been a complete clusterfuck in they way they have done it, but if windows was using regular windows installs to gather screenshots and then phone them home it would be both incredibly stupid on Microsoft's part (for a huge amount of companies that would be a deal breaker) and be very discoverable.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No, you’re thinking of the piece that will offload the AI processing to the local machine. They’re likely still capturing everything, and processing at least some of it back at their data centers.

It is discoverable. That’s what we’re doing here. Positing that may be the cause of the significantly increased overhead in Windows 11. If it were simply telemetry, as you’re suggesting, we would’ve seen the same performance hit in Windows 8 & 10. That we’re seeing such a decline from 10 to 11 on the exact same hardware suggests this goes way beyond that.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Saying "new windows is slow as hell" is not evidence that they are capturing and sending off screenshots (which is far more intrusive than even the first fucked up proposal for recall before they walked it back significantly). ME and Vista were both slow as shit too but they weren't doing this.

Again windows is spying on you, just not in that particular way which would be very easy for security researchers to discover and would be catastrophic for businesses trust in Microsoft if it was discovered.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You need to pick a lane. You gonna play dumb, or present yourself as knowledgeable?

Because anyone knowledgeable enough to be clued in on just how extensively Windows is now spying would also understand that Microsoft lying to all of their customers, and going way over the line with it to the point of illegality, is completely and totally believable and absolutely in line with Microsoft’s pattern of behavior.

Since when has ‘security researchers will eventually catch you’ ever prevented these big tech companies from breaking the law before?

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No I don't need to "pick a lane", just because Microsoft are awful does not mean any claim about them doing a bad thing is sensible no matter how far fetched. Microsoft do care about how windows is perceived by businesses (as opposed to you and I think about them, which they do not care about), and the risk of doing what you are alleging is very high for them (easy to detect) and would have severe negative consequences for them (oops, cant use windows in healthcare as its leaking PII). To add to this the only evidence you are presenting for it is "windows is slow".

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I’m familiar with the arguments. I’ve had this argument with bad actors time & time again every time Microsoft starts rolling out something even worse. It’s always some version of, ‘Microsoft is bad, but they would never do that!’

And then it comes out a year later that they would, in fact, do that.

Do they have you assigned to play devil’s advocate just on Lemmy, or are you tasked with this on the Reddit technology sub, too?

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what I am saying. I'm not saying they "wouldn't do this, they're not that bad" I'm saying "they wouldn't do this as it would get them little, they'd get caught and it would have bad blowback for them".

They're also not stealing peoples bank accounts or blackmailing people with personal information. Again, just because they are shitbags does not mean every bad thing you can come up with no evidence is true.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

‘They’re not doing this thing they already announced they would be doing a couple months back!’

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ok I'm done here if you're just going to start making shit up. No they did not announce that they would record peoples screenshots without their permission and start uploading them to their servers.

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

They didn’t announce Recall? They haven’t been caught misusing customer data before? They haven’t been increasing their spying efforts since Windows 8?

Y’all need a new playbook. This might have worked to sell people on Windows changes in the past, but you’ve overused this strategy to the point that it’s lost all plausibility.