A Windows 10 bug or design flaw is causing taskbar’s jump list (right-click menu) to slow down on some computers. Windows 10 taskbar comes with a feature called ‘Jump List’, which has been around since Windows 7 and it allows you to right-click an app’s icon to access frequently used items.
For example, when you right-click Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge icon pinned to the taskbar, you can find recent items you were working on, frequently visited websites, and option to close the browser’s window.
If you closely observe the animation of taskbar’s right-click menu, you’ll notice that there is a delay of 200-250ms until the menu appears.
This experience is not convenient or streamlined as you have to wait a while for the jump lists to appear. Last year, a similar problem was fixed whereby there was a delay of 500ms delay with the jump list.
Unfortunately, Windows 10’s taskbar is still plagued with performance issues and there remains a delay of 200-250ms.
“This is well beyond the ideal human interaction times and is a constant frustration. I don’t want to wait for my computer, especially when doing simple and repetitive actions that I know it should be able to do roughly ten times faster,” Google engineer Bruce Dawson noted, who observed this behaviour on a device with 32GB of memory and 2TB SSD.
Google developer believes that the jump list should be faster and he expects the menu to appear instantly, ideally in less than 50ms.
Windows 10’s jump list delay happens with all programs, including Notepad, WordPad, Chrome, Edge, and Microsoft Teams. Dawson also discovered that the problem is not limited to the jump list as there is also a noticeable delay when you left-click on the clock on the taskbar.
“Thus, in the particular event that I am looking at the total latency is 230 ms. This is fairly consistent across multiple traces, multiple clicks on the same entry, etc,” Google dev wrote in a Github post.
Bruce noted that there are many things the Windows team could work on to address the performance issue with right-click on taskbar entries.
Fortunately, the bug report has been acknowledged by Rich Turner, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft. According to Rich Turner, Microsoft’s product team are currently investigating the report and they’ll share the result of the findings soon.
If you use flagship hardware, chances are you won’t notice taskbar performance problems, but the delay could be noticeable on low-end hardware, especially older devices.
