I would have been happy with no seconds in the tray, but showing the seconds if you click on the clock - technology that existed a decade ago in Windows 10, but is obviously technologically impossible for hundreds of PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.
All the smart engineers must have left to do AI stuff. The new windows 11 "power savings" settings menu has this gamification angle. It tells you that you've enabled "5 of 7 power saving settings" or whatever, in a way that implies the goal is to get all 7. It triggers my OCD every time I see the screen and it implies that quest is unfinished.
Performative environmentalism, standard operating procedure for every big company. Shift the blame onto the consumer, make them feel guilty because they set their screen timeout to to more than 5 minutes. Gamification is a great tool for making people feel pressured and guilty but with plausible deniability for the company.
Meanwhile, build database centers at incredible scale to run AI and force it into those same consumers in every way possible, but never tell them how much power that wastes.
I think the removal was originally about memory usage in Win 95 due to fitting the new OS into lower RAM systems. Then it was about battery usage. More recently the epidemic of feature and information removal from interfaces is primarily driven by the obsession of UX designers to dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator.
By controlling how usage analytics are instrumented UX designers can weaponize the data to support removing almost any feature or information they don't personally find essential. Of course, this entirely misses the fact that power users drive word-of-mouth and adoption >10x more than lowest common denominator users and also have significantly higher lifetime value because they are engaged and loyal (until you finally remove too much advanced utility). I'm all for simplicity - what I don't understand is the insistence on removing features or capabilities entirely instead of just putting them as an option in advanced settings. Different users have different preferences and good UX design can maintain surface simplicity without trashing depth, flexibility and personalization.
>”PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.”
Let’s be honest, implementing this would be up to a bunch of offshore contractors because corporate can’t bring itself to pay software engineers to implement this feature thoughtfully and comprehensively.
Then wait until you learn of useful features that existed in Windows 7 and were removed... I'm especially baffled at the worsening of the file copy dialog.
> I call bull on every part of this story when it talks about "power team looking at windows performance as a whole, environment etc."
I am sure that the Power team has the understanding that user-initiated activity isn’t really anything they can control.
Once the user takes over, all tricks for efficiency go out the window. The user could run anything.
I don’t work for MS but I’m sure the Power team cares about the automatic built-in stuff that runs on schedules and timers: the things they can control. The start button doesn’t click itself.
I agree that using web tech to render things in the OS is silly, but Microsoft has been doing it in every Explorer window since 2001 with Windows XP. I don’t remember anyone complaining about that at the time except me.
It's a bit hard to call bullshit when even the summary of the discussion is still measured to the microwatt.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were some misalignments in goals though. E.g. if their team's goals are measured in results of typical battery life tests such as "how many hours the computer can sit idle playing a video" then they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws.
I thought it was because the new code for win11 called the old code for win10 which called the old code for winX which called the old code for WinY, which called an old DOS routine.
I hate these kind of “saves power” things in windows settings. The OS itself pings home so often, sends network request for everything you do, shows ads on the login screen, makes screenshots (for Recall), Edge sends contents from web forms for “AI”. And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things!
This is only true if you enable extended spell checks, which makes some sense. By default, no form data is sent to Microsoft AFAIK. Note that the same holds for Google Chrome.
Both things can be true/desirable at the same time.
If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd also be glad if they didn't do as much weird stuff on their user's devices as they do.
> If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI.
I'd rather them write more performant code. This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that.
Mentioning that some setting uses more power can be useful and desirable. I think Jaxan might be irked by "energy recommendations" Windows gives you in power & battery settings, though. It suggests applying "energy saving recommendations" to lower your carbon footprint, and while I absolutely support energy saving, I also find those "recommendations" obnoxious.
The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and turning the screen off after 3 minutes.
Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect), and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts.
When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.
The test setting is important here - the test is on an otherwise idle machine. This means that the update ensures that some thread wakes on a timer every second which may explain the large drop. This test is interesting, but not very representative of a real world usage scenario. It’ll be interesting to compare it to the results of the other test they running, where they keep a video running in the background.
And it is only getting worse. I would consider windows update on its own enough reason for not using this shit os at all. Be aware!
https://youtu.be/4RQ6pek3JoM
This is not Windows-specific, it has been shown wrt. Linux systems also. It's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows (that also causes frequent wakeups and screen updates) and why it probably makes sense to disable most animations too.
There was a fight in Vista time frame about whether or not animated/video desktop backgrounds were a good idea. They were definitely cool, but AT WHAT COST. Ended up shipping as an "extra".
That reminds me of Chrom[e|ium]'s insanely bad form suggest/autofill logic: The browser creates some sort of fuzzy hash/fingerprint of the forms you visit, and uses that with some Google black box to "crowdsource" what kinds of field-data to suggest... even when both the user and the web-designer try to stop it.
For example, imagine you're editing a list of Customers, and Chrome keeps trying to trick you into entering your own "first name" and "last name" whenever you add or edit an entry. For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it.
I'm not sure how much of a privacy leak those form-fingerprints are, but they are presumptively shady when the developers ignore countless detailed complaints over many years in order to keep the behavior.
> For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it.
To be fair, websites with a horrible misunderstanding of security kept on using that for "this password is important, better make sure the user is forced to enter it by hand!"
And forcefully overrides personal preferences to NOT ahouls any Windows Spotlight images and trivia on lock screen, and news and recommended content on Edge homescreen
> And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things!
and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants
"This is Windows 11, you'll need a new PC for it, throw away your old PC and wreck the planet some more, and by the way we'll stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025, if your PC gets a malware and your bank account gets hacked and drained it's not our fault".
(linux + KDE) i save 24% by using black (#000000) everything, backgrounds, full theme, contrast control setting in firefox etc. on notebook with OLED screen. also if possible not using Chromes / safaris youtube video player but downloading of a video makes huge energy savings. (and using MPV in linux or properly configured PotPlayer in windows. VLC or default MS video apps are bad at energy saving.)
And we are talking about 15+ hours of actual office work in webbrowser + little bit of python math. so add 24% on top of that... that is literally weekend worth of work on one charge. current generation of laptop CPUS is insane.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to not have the system lose so much energy with this setting? My watch too updates seconds every second. Someone in the comments on this thread has mentioned hardware-based blinking cursors. A computer that could do over billion calculations per second should not need much to render a 30x30 (say) pixel area.
(1) For mostly static screens that the GPU's frame buffer (and pipeline) could be empty and there would be nothing to process.
(2) The font rendering algorithm will have to run every second. These are not simple bitmap-type monospace fonts, and thus the calculation of the output will have to be done every second and that these rendered digits-combinations likely aren't cached.
(3) The thread for system clock displaying system can set a sleep for 1 minute (after it has aligned to the start of the minute (or in actuality the cron-type service underlying operating systems is likely used here for which the alignment to the minute start is already a given)), instead of 1 second.
For #2, it needs to render around 66 characters per minute. The power loss mentioned collectively is 15% in battery life. When I open a Word doc, that would show say around 1500 characters on the screen within two-three sevonds without any noteworthy drop in battery level. Hence, I do not think it is font rendering.
That's quite surprising. I wouldn't have imagined Windows (or any other "desktop OS") to go to great lengths to optimize for static screen content in the way that e.g. smartphones or wearables do, which as I understand have dedicated hardware optimized for displaying a fully static screen while powering down large parts of the display pipeline.
The decision to now show seconds dates back to Windows 95. Back then the motivation was not power saving, but rather to allow the code related to the clock and text rendering to be swapped out to disk on a 386 with 4MB RAM... Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42...
Desktop OSs idle most of the time, and the comparison is with respect to an idle desktop. Forcing context switches and propagating updates through the GUI stack every second isn’t free in that situation, it means that at least one CPU core can’t stay in a lower-power state. In contrast, you probably won’t see much of difference in battery life for the seconds display when simultaneously watching video or running computational tasks.
I hope so, because I actively want seconds absent from the system tray. Attention is a scarce resource; the fewer things on the screen constantly changing and thereby consuming my attention, the better. If saving power means we remain free from that anti-feature, great.
I, for one, love it for casual and incidental benchmarking. Of everything - not just a process I run, but also how long between bird chirps outside my window. But I also find it very easy to ignore, too. Glad it’s optional.
Ideally the clock display should be customisable to display whatever level of precision you want; I believe at least one Linux application lets you specify it via a strftime() format string.
> Some Reddit users on the same thread also pointed out that while the system is already doing plenty in the background, even small updates like this might prevent deeper power-saving states.
This is undoubtedly the answer, and I suspect that if any actual effort were made by Microsoft, the problem might be eliminated entirely. Maybe.
Most likely, the update is implemented calling a standard stack of system calls that are completely benign in a normal application, which is already limiting power savings in various ways. But when run by itself, the call stack is triggering a bunch of stuff that ends up using a bit more power.
The big question is: Can this actually be optimized with some dedicated programming time? Or is the display/task bar/scheduling such a convoluted mess in Windows that updating the time every second without causing a bunch of other stuff to wake up is impossible without a complete rewrite.
Readit News
Meanwhile, build database centers at incredible scale to run AI and force it into those same consumers in every way possible, but never tell them how much power that wastes.
By controlling how usage analytics are instrumented UX designers can weaponize the data to support removing almost any feature or information they don't personally find essential. Of course, this entirely misses the fact that power users drive word-of-mouth and adoption >10x more than lowest common denominator users and also have significantly higher lifetime value because they are engaged and loyal (until you finally remove too much advanced utility). I'm all for simplicity - what I don't understand is the insistence on removing features or capabilities entirely instead of just putting them as an option in advanced settings. Different users have different preferences and good UX design can maintain surface simplicity without trashing depth, flexibility and personalization.
Let’s be honest, implementing this would be up to a bunch of offshore contractors because corporate can’t bring itself to pay software engineers to implement this feature thoughtfully and comprehensively.
Perhaps you would like to ask Copilot for the time?
Deleted Comment
Because it's enough to look at modern Windows and things like "CPU spikes 100s of percent when opening start menu because it's now written in React"
I am sure that the Power team has the understanding that user-initiated activity isn’t really anything they can control.
Once the user takes over, all tricks for efficiency go out the window. The user could run anything.
I don’t work for MS but I’m sure the Power team cares about the automatic built-in stuff that runs on schedules and timers: the things they can control. The start button doesn’t click itself.
I agree that using web tech to render things in the OS is silly, but Microsoft has been doing it in every Explorer window since 2001 with Windows XP. I don’t remember anyone complaining about that at the time except me.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were some misalignments in goals though. E.g. if their team's goals are measured in results of typical battery life tests such as "how many hours the computer can sit idle playing a video" then they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws.
They send any text you type in a form to their AI cloud and hold on to it for 30 days.
Any form.
On any website.
What the actual fuck?
Does anyone know if that is true?
Dead Comment
If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd also be glad if they didn't do as much weird stuff on their user's devices as they do.
I'd rather them write more performant code. This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that.
The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and turning the screen off after 3 minutes.
Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect), and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts.
When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.
Also airlines asking for extra money to offset emissions, just absolute insanity
This used to be done entirely in hardware (VGA text modes), and I believe some early GPUs had a feature to do that in graphics modes too.
It is not. This "feature" is disabled by default.
Google "manufactured outrage".
(For the record, I abhor Windows 11)
It doesn't because that feature only just release, only works on specific new laptops and most ipmortant: YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY ENABLE IT
That reminds me of Chrom[e|ium]'s insanely bad form suggest/autofill logic: The browser creates some sort of fuzzy hash/fingerprint of the forms you visit, and uses that with some Google black box to "crowdsource" what kinds of field-data to suggest... even when both the user and the web-designer try to stop it.
For example, imagine you're editing a list of Customers, and Chrome keeps trying to trick you into entering your own "first name" and "last name" whenever you add or edit an entry. For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it.
I'm not sure how much of a privacy leak those form-fingerprints are, but they are presumptively shady when the developers ignore countless detailed complaints over many years in order to keep the behavior.
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420
To be fair, websites with a horrible misunderstanding of security kept on using that for "this password is important, better make sure the user is forced to enter it by hand!"
and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants
powered by fossil fuels
And we are talking about 15+ hours of actual office work in webbrowser + little bit of python math. so add 24% on top of that... that is literally weekend worth of work on one charge. current generation of laptop CPUS is insane.
(1) For mostly static screens that the GPU's frame buffer (and pipeline) could be empty and there would be nothing to process.
(2) The font rendering algorithm will have to run every second. These are not simple bitmap-type monospace fonts, and thus the calculation of the output will have to be done every second and that these rendered digits-combinations likely aren't cached.
(3) The thread for system clock displaying system can set a sleep for 1 minute (after it has aligned to the start of the minute (or in actuality the cron-type service underlying operating systems is likely used here for which the alignment to the minute start is already a given)), instead of 1 second.
For #2, it needs to render around 66 characters per minute. The power loss mentioned collectively is 15% in battery life. When I open a Word doc, that would show say around 1500 characters on the screen within two-three sevonds without any noteworthy drop in battery level. Hence, I do not think it is font rendering.
On my laptop, I can check if it is enabled with:
This is undoubtedly the answer, and I suspect that if any actual effort were made by Microsoft, the problem might be eliminated entirely. Maybe.
Most likely, the update is implemented calling a standard stack of system calls that are completely benign in a normal application, which is already limiting power savings in various ways. But when run by itself, the call stack is triggering a bunch of stuff that ends up using a bit more power.
The big question is: Can this actually be optimized with some dedicated programming time? Or is the display/task bar/scheduling such a convoluted mess in Windows that updating the time every second without causing a bunch of other stuff to wake up is impossible without a complete rewrite.