The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
On my 5 year old work laptop it was so bad it was nearly unusable. I found that disabling the shell extensions they used to implement the new file explorer UI helped a lot with that.
They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.
It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...
I often used it to convert unix style line endings to windows. Notepad choked on those, wordpad could load them easily, and just resaving them as a txt file converted them to windows line endings.
IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
It's an amazing technical feat how they managed to introduce a graphical delay to it in Windows 10. I feel it actually took planning to work out how to introduce friction into easily the simplest conceivable app for no reason. It is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with Windows today.
It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.