Microsoft has been busy recovering from its Copilot-based hangover. We saw the company go wild with its AI tool in 2025, and sometime around October, it realized others didn't share its adoration for it.

In a bid to fight back against accusations of becoming "Microslop," the company has been rolling back its Copilot integrations and allocating engineering hours to fixing Windows 11's main pain points. And as it turns out, part of that is making File Explorer fast again (via Windows Central).

Windows K2 will make File Explorer even faster than before

And it's all thanks to WinUI 3

In a post on the Windows UI GitHub page, Microsoft detailed what it has planned for the operating system. Part of the Windows K2 plan involves migrating key OS components to a new piece of tech:

Our mission is to make WinUI 3 the best native UI platform for Windows experiences and apps and performance is at the heart of that effort. Moving from WinUI 2 to WinUI 3 should always be a clear win for performance, and apps should get great results without heavy lifting.

The company will ideally roll this tech out as widely as it can, but for benchmarking purposes, it focused on how WinUI 3 fares with File Explorer. The new tech reduced a significant amount of resource usage:

• Allocations: 41% fewer
• Transient allocations: 63% fewer
• Function calls: 45% fewer
• Time spent in WinUI code: 25% reduction

Microsoft hopes to get these tweaks released from the development branch "soon," so we should see them arrive on Windows 11 in the not-so-distant future.