why is Snowbird browser faster than Windows Explorer..?

Question

I was wondering how such performance can be achieved on windows as I noticed snowberd is even faster than DOS "dir" command, even in mapped network drives...?

Any idea what algo/technology are used to get such fast directory browsing...?

Answer 1

I guess the most proper way is using Windows Shell stuff.

Maybe dir command is slow because of screen output overhead? When I do "dir >output.txt" I don't see any significant performance difference with file browsing software.