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MS Word opens twice as slow on Windows 11 PCs as on MacBooks, and Microsoft has no excuse
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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Legacy code bloat. How much of that macOS code is even from win32 word?
I don't think it's the old code that's bloated. I've been using office '97 at work for... reasons, and despite some bugs it still runs on the latest windows server, does pretty much everything Word 365 does and is much faster.... really makes you think.
I'm pretty sure Office 97 was the last version to not use ribbons or have auto-arranging menus. As a support worker, nothing was worse than those two items. Having to walk someone through clicking a series of static menus was so much easier, could even be done in a doc with optional graphics, and the user might learn something in the process. After those things, there was no standard, anything could be anywhere, and there was no guarantee you or the user would know where to find the thing you were looking for. And they called it progress.
Word 97 also has a memory requirement of 8 MB. That legacy win32 code is extremely optimized, programmed in a time where every bit and byte was considered. It's today's background services and applications that slow Windows down, consuming memory and cycles for no apparent reason.
Office apps have also become much slower and less stable since they integrated cloud support and bolted on javascript for the user interface.
I had the same issue with slow loading office at work. If you check the network request, office opens 10 or even more connections on startup, i guess at least one is for licence check, possibly another one for one drive. However one of the requests took more than 8 seconds to complete, and during the whole time office would just sit idle.
Not to mention new outlook which won't even open without an internet connection
ostensibly, it's also for things like collaboration. But I'm willing to bet that at least half the data going across the servers are telemetry and... if we're being honest, probably corporate espionage.
Last I heard the Mac version of word was entirely different code than the Windows program. Different teams too.
But that was a long time ago. Things could have changed especially with the change to subscription/web deployment.
Nah I use office 2013 at work because fuck 365 and it is fine.