Have you often encountered a situation where you try to open a folder containing thousands of photos or other files, or search for something in a folder, and Explorer “thinks” for a long time and forces you to wait for the indicator? To the top of the page to finish loading? This issue is present in both Windows 10 and version 11 of the operating system. However, the detected error indicates that the opposite is possible, apparently the company does not want this.

How to reproduce the error?

This bug (or maybe it should have been like this all along?) was found by user X @VivyVCCS. It says that quickly switching Explorer to full-screen mode by pressing F11 and then exiting full-screen mode by pressing F11 again has the following results: almost instant loading of folder contents and creation of thumbnails for viewing files. Search functionality in Explorer is also getting faster.

This has also been confirmed by other users:

• One of them reported testing the bug on a music folder with over 1,800 subfolders and over 25,000 files. According to that “everything opens instantly”.
• Another commenter wrote that he tried to test the method on a computer with an i7-7700HQ processor and Windows 11 build 22H2: “And it works. I can’t believe it. It was so unexpected and sudden. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about it anymore.”.

This bug appears to affect all versions of Windows 11, starting with the Canary Insider build up to the original release (22000, 21H2). Although it makes File Explorer faster, it would be better if we could get this performance by default. Initially, Windows 11 was expected to have better overall performance than previous versions, but in practice Windows 10 turned out to be faster. By the way, this method doesn’t work for him.