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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.