Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly

IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.

Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.

I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!

Gmail used to offer a low bandwidth / performance webmail interface, that was essentially their original UI. Ran like greased lightning, used barely any memory. Emails loaded almost instantly.

It was nice while it lasted.

The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.

Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.

I think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.

Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.

It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.

It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.

Why this enshittification…

I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).

Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).

Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …

It's not just Windows. It's everything Microsoft.

What steams my clams is that I can press Reply in Outlook and be halfway through the first sentence of my message before the reply window even opens. (M4 Pro)

Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background. This doesn't happen with other mail clients on the same machine.

It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.

As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.

The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.

Microslop at its best.

I’m struggling to understand what their end goal is. How much can you half ass everything until your entire company becomes just a nuisance.

Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.

Sounds like something is wrong with your system.

My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.

That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.

Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.

I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).

There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.

Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.

It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.

I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".

Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.

At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.

Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.

I switched in 2023 or so, I have not seen one headline per your example or anecdote or comment or tea leaves that have made me question moving away from windows.

Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.

Or Outlook.com, their free webmail alternative to Gmail?

Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe

It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.

Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)

Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview

Not a product manager but I habitually try to play devil's advocate as one. I think it's popularity, full stop. You _could_ vibe code a native app no problem - but then you're targeting one set of hardware. If you're already just vibing it, why not make something that will work cross-platform while you're at it? And if an LLM is prompted with that, they'll usually go with the popular choice: web app on Electron.

Man, I've really been falling into his stuff. So refreshing to hear someone speak from a perspective of care. It's good for my soul in this world of slop.

I wish we had more Casey Muratoris and less Sam Altmans.

and now you can use AI to create even more unnecessary features even quicker.

i think that having teams for each product is an antipattern. if the team was purely a "mail task force", the workers could be placed to work on Exchange or the Azure related bullshit. But now, the Outlook team has to constantly create unnecessary work for itself.

> In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat.

I'm curious how much of those 150 are things that can't be boiled down to 'text', since that should be roughly the same size as on completely un-bloated software. The database of emails, the plain text of said emails, and all the basic UI should all be nothing but text and take up next to nothing.

Images on the other hand. I'd imagine Outlook Classic hasn't been made with 1 MB PNGs for all their icons, so it's probably not that that's pulling the memory usage, although it's probably contributing. Meanwhile, New Outlook (New) probably didn't optimise a single thing, so it probably is using 1 MB icons, which then quickly piles up. Not to mention the whole webview rendering backend, since we apparently can't make anything without going through a few layers of abstraction first.

When I was using Thunderbird on Windows back years ago, i abandoned it in a week because it was absolutely slow when fed with years of archives as compared to Outlook 2010. Seeing recs for Thunderbird recently says something for sure.

> They have enough employees to build native apps

They'd screw those up as well.

New Outlook doesn't actually do IMAP at all. What it does is sending your IMAP credentials in clear text to a remote Microsoft server, which will then fetch email for you.

Clicking a Teams meeting link from Outlook Calendar opens the pre-meeting screen to allow enable/disable of camera/microphone, plus it also loads up a little reminder window with Join and Dismiss buttons _over the top_ of the Join button of the pre-meeting screen.

Every time.

And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.

I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.

Maybe they do respect themselves and have decided the money in the job is just a means to other ways of respecting themselves that don't involve benefiting MS or customers or users.

Often people have no say in the matter. Major of forced Microsoft usage comes from corporate IT. Corporate IT likes Microsoft because the amount of tooling available to manage it. Often these same people run Linux or Mac at home.

Rest of the people do not know the difference or know how to change out the software with better alternatives. Example, Firefox keeps loosing customers to Chrome and yet Firefox fully supports Manifest V2 with proper Ad-Block support, which increases computer security. Show these people an Ad heavy website with Chrome vs Firefox & U-Block Origin, this looks like magic to them.

Personally, you have to pay me to use Microsoft products. I have been game exclusively on Linux for nearly 10 years now. Before that, 5 years of dual booting just to game.

I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010.

Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?

Where does it break nav? Honest question, because I have been living inside it for almost 7 years now and actually prefer it to any of the desktop clients (except on the Mac).

Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.

I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.

IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:

- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider

- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)

Do you have a job?

Just tried it. It loads instantly and then loads some other stuff I never seen before. However for me the main thing still loads instantly.

Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.

Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.

Linux doesn’t define a GUI. I think you mean ”Now if only there were a distribution of Linux that implemented my personal idea of what a GUI should be.”

To which, I bet someone does. If you think Windows nails all the right ideas, there is Mint.

I like that many of the people the agree with this live in California and are or assume to be happy with complete one-party rule.

I think that's caused by OneDrive. Which was the "shove down your throat" flavour of a couple of generations ago.

F OneDrive.

Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.

Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.

Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.

Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..

[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.

Are we talking about the same Outlook here? And I mean that sincerely. I just joined a new company and now have to use MS software for the first time since Windows 7. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, you name it, are all a clunky mess (at least on MacOs).

What I don't understand is why search is so broken.

If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?

Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.

Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.

That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.

Another way to say tenth of a second is 100,000,000 nanoseconds.

We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?

Edit: Corrected the scale factor.

What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?

Is the new Outlook client a JS/Electron app?

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