10 ms·

I smell a lot of nostalgia in this thread, and rightfully so! IE has been a terrible browser, but it was our terrible browser. But fear not! Outlook still uses

I smell a lot of nostalgia in this thread, and rightfully so! IE has been a terrible browser, but it was our terrible browser. But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere.

easton 5y ago
When Outlook becomes a PWA (currently in test, I think it's probably two-three years from stable), it'll be rendering mail with all the functionality of Blink. Which depending on your point of view, means a sigh of relief or time to buy more RAM. https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-universal-email-client-microsoft https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-u...
- sebazzz 5y ago
  More RAM or worse performance? I doubt it, given the COM addons my employer stuffs in my Outlook client. Zipmail among others.
  - easton 5y ago
    If you want to switch to this, PWA install is available for Outlook Web App right now (just sign into outlook.office.com and click on the plus button that appears in the address bar in Edge or Chrome). If you don't have any crazy mail needs it works fine.
    - chihuahua 5y ago
      Thanks for the tip - I just tried this out in the free outlook.com client, and it works there too.
- djxfade 5y ago
  But Gmail is already a web app, and only supports a tiny subset of modern HTML and CSS. The limitation is of course arbitrary, it could in theory support any modern standards. But HTML mail is so quirky and full of hacks, that they probably have to do it that way to preserve compatibility. Apple's Mail app is one of the few modern mail clients that can render modern HTML/CSS
  - whakim 5y ago
    That's true, and I wish that emails could just work like everything else on the web. But simply removing Outlook and all its baggage from the equation would be a big, big improvement on the status quo.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      There are good reasons to reject a lot of it. You don't want JS running in an email for example. Or even some of the fancier CSS abilities.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        But then why have HTML email at all? You could just write in markdown.
        jiofih 5y ago
        Not a bad idea.
        nexuist 5y ago
        Why have HTML email in the first place? No other messaging client lets you send entire HTML documents as messages. Just send me some words and a link to click on in a proper browser. The fact that HTML email is so bloated and a nightmare to eyeballs eveywhere is (IMO) a huge reason why conversations (even professional ones) shifted over to Slack, SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc. I want a place to talk to people, not to shitty template engines. But if you're going to automate my conversation, use words, not posters.
        SilverRed 5y ago
        You're comment made me think about why we actually use slack/IM when email is just as capable and I think the answer is that I can have notifications turned on for IM and I can't do that for email. Which means I respond much slower to email. IM is one of the last places on the internet not filled with automated crap, advertisers and spam. And to be fair, some of that automated crap I actually want and browse through at a later time but IM explicitly separates real time messages and newsletters.
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  Outlook is a PWA
- formercoder 5y ago
  Wow this is awful. I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native.
  - waheoo 5y ago
    Thunderbird is still a thing and Google supports IMAP.
    - benhurmarcel 5y ago
      Many companies disable IMAP for data security
  - arvindamirtaa 5y ago
    FYI, Gmail works on Outlook. But the ability to use extensions may be limited on some platforms.
  - golergka 5y ago
    Is it? For an application which has rendering HTML content (emails) as its primary function, being a PWA and using something like Electron actually sounds like a good choice.
  - dahart 5y ago
    > I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native. Hehe, I also moved to an Outlook company a few years back. I’ve had to switch completely to the Outlook Web App (OWA), the native app gets too bogged down after a while, and it’s frustrating to deal with Outlook native across multiple machines. My Outlook experience was vastly improved when I stopped using the native client. And there are a lot of reasons I prefer Gmail as well, Outlook seems to lose threads easily, the spam filtering isn’t as good, and it has all kinds of unintuitive UI quirks and gaps.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thrower123 5y ago
  Damn, hopefully it is more than two or three years out. I'm enjoying Outlook being one of the most stable and least resource-hungry applications that I run on a daily basis. Also, if it's going to be a packaged-up version of the Outlook webapp, I'm going to lose the global unread mail folder, which is going to kill me, given the way my inbox folders and rules are set up by customer.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  I'm pretty ok with emails just being barely more than text thank you
detritus 5y ago
Going a bit further back, IE 5 and 6 were the best browser by far. Strange for me to think that my now-beloved Firefox has its heritage embedded in Netscape, which at the same time as IE5 was an absolute pig. - ed for some reason I have it in mind as IE5.5 specifically that was The Great IE.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I have a version of myself aged in their twenties and working in web development that really wants to stab anyone believing that IE6 was the best browser. I won't argue that it wasn't decent at launch, but MS kept support for that browser around way too long and failed to actually roll out support for new features that customers desired. I believe it was the era of IE6 specifically that led to the proliferation of top-right-corner.jpg which was an absolute abomination.
  - detritus 5y ago
    Oh, don't get me wrong - it was a Trojan Horse, and my first ever web browsing experience was on Navigator, so it was a hard-hearted appreciation at the time. But from my stand point then, It Just Worked.
    - ido 5y ago
      Same for me - I started browsing the web on Mosaic and quickly switched to Netscape. I hung on during the Netscape 4.x days but at some point couldn't deny how much better IE was (I think maybe even IE 4 was already as good or better than Netscape). I switched to IE until the Mozilla suit released and later on switched to Firefox 0.something - it was amazing how fast it was compared to both IE6 and Mozilla.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        Some time around 2001 or 2002 I bought Opera (with tabs!) and that just made the internet usable.
  - 5y ago
saos 5y ago
> But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. My biggest ever frustration.
major505 5y ago
no, not really. If I could I would be the first to thrown it in a deep hole in the ground and seal with concrete to make sure it never rises again.
userbinator 5y ago
If they took the Edge rendering engine (which is really like Chromium or some close approximation of it now) and put it in the IE UI instead of the opposite, I think that would get a lot of praise from me and probably many others including all the Google-drunk web developers. Those who like IE and prefer it to other browsers are doing so despite its horrible rendering engine.
- fomine3 5y ago
  I doubt such users had used Chrome frame instead of Chrome.
- Ndymium 5y ago
  The Edge rendering engine is Blink, because Edge is a fork of Chromium now.
gerdesj 5y ago
"but it was our terrible browser." Don't you dare include me in "our" 8) My first browser was telnet (1992ish) From 1993 onwards it was all a bit weird in internets land. For me the golden time for wwwbly_internets was around 2000-5 or so. /. was still (just) worth reading, FB was still a bulge in MZ's trousers. Google was cool, Amazon was clever, Apple was cool. The www was still interesting - US frontier like. I am of course joking. Today's www is not the same as that in say 2000. Google is not cool, Apple is not cool, Facebook is unpleasant, Amazon is not cool and quite odd.
- Laforet 5y ago
  eBay has changed very little since then if that helps, however PayPal might as well be unrecognisable.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    I often think that EBay are outdated in almost every regard. Their UI is confusing, spaghetti code, an obvious mixture of old pages and new pages and until recently, still seemed to use some bootstrap dll for requests. I guess your damned if you update and damned if you don't.
underscore_ku 5y ago
not my browser! i use Linux - Chromium or Firefox
Baeocystin 5y ago
I work in small business IT, and I literally have to use IE11 on a weekly basis to interface with some shoddy something. And it's not necessarily just old stuff, either- there are brand new NVRs and cameras going in today that require IE and some godforsaken ActiveX control to work. IE is going to be around for a long time.
- etripe 5y ago
  Isn't that also what people said about Flash?
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    Yes, and they were right. I have to deal with Flash regularly, too. So much so that I keep a VM around for solely that purpose.
augustk 5y ago
> Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. Maybe that's why my replies from Thunderbird using interspersed posting shows up empty for some Outlook users.
OakNinja 5y ago
I was helping a friend out with html email templates a while ago, and it was like time traveling back to 2001 Geocities web development. Table hell…
horsawlarway 5y ago
> But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. I feel you, and if you're an enterprise user still on the last LTSB release (1803) then yes - Outlook is still using a trident based browser. If you're on 1903 or above, though, my understanding is that you're now on a WebView2 engine running roughly what's in Edge right now: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ I know for a fact that our company's product for Outlook (an addin.js extension) has suddenly started working for customers in Outlook when they upgrade, and we're not IE11 compatible.
tresvert 5y ago
I agree with this one; it will always be etched on our hearts. The good thing is that even though IE 11 will retire, Microsoft Edge is here to stay. It's even better than other browsers, for sure. I tried using it, and I love the browsing experience.

easton 5y ago

When Outlook becomes a PWA (currently in test, I think it's probably two-three years from stable), it'll be rendering mail with all the functionality of Blink. Which depending on your point of view, means a sigh of relief or time to buy more RAM. https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-universal-email-client-microsoft https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-u...

sebazzz 5y ago
More RAM or worse performance? I doubt it, given the COM addons my employer stuffs in my Outlook client. Zipmail among others.
- easton 5y ago
  If you want to switch to this, PWA install is available for Outlook Web App right now (just sign into outlook.office.com and click on the plus button that appears in the address bar in Edge or Chrome). If you don't have any crazy mail needs it works fine.
  - chihuahua 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip - I just tried this out in the free outlook.com client, and it works there too.
djxfade 5y ago
But Gmail is already a web app, and only supports a tiny subset of modern HTML and CSS. The limitation is of course arbitrary, it could in theory support any modern standards. But HTML mail is so quirky and full of hacks, that they probably have to do it that way to preserve compatibility. Apple's Mail app is one of the few modern mail clients that can render modern HTML/CSS
- whakim 5y ago
  That's true, and I wish that emails could just work like everything else on the web. But simply removing Outlook and all its baggage from the equation would be a big, big improvement on the status quo.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    There are good reasons to reject a lot of it. You don't want JS running in an email for example. Or even some of the fancier CSS abilities.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      But then why have HTML email at all? You could just write in markdown.
      - jiofih 5y ago
        Not a bad idea.
      - nexuist 5y ago
        Why have HTML email in the first place? No other messaging client lets you send entire HTML documents as messages. Just send me some words and a link to click on in a proper browser. The fact that HTML email is so bloated and a nightmare to eyeballs eveywhere is (IMO) a huge reason why conversations (even professional ones) shifted over to Slack, SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc. I want a place to talk to people, not to shitty template engines. But if you're going to automate my conversation, use words, not posters.
        SilverRed 5y ago
        You're comment made me think about why we actually use slack/IM when email is just as capable and I think the answer is that I can have notifications turned on for IM and I can't do that for email. Which means I respond much slower to email. IM is one of the last places on the internet not filled with automated crap, advertisers and spam. And to be fair, some of that automated crap I actually want and browse through at a later time but IM explicitly separates real time messages and newsletters.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
Outlook is a PWA
formercoder 5y ago
Wow this is awful. I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native.
- waheoo 5y ago
  Thunderbird is still a thing and Google supports IMAP.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    Many companies disable IMAP for data security
- arvindamirtaa 5y ago
  FYI, Gmail works on Outlook. But the ability to use extensions may be limited on some platforms.
- golergka 5y ago
  Is it? For an application which has rendering HTML content (emails) as its primary function, being a PWA and using something like Electron actually sounds like a good choice.
- dahart 5y ago
  > I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native. Hehe, I also moved to an Outlook company a few years back. I’ve had to switch completely to the Outlook Web App (OWA), the native app gets too bogged down after a while, and it’s frustrating to deal with Outlook native across multiple machines. My Outlook experience was vastly improved when I stopped using the native client. And there are a lot of reasons I prefer Gmail as well, Outlook seems to lose threads easily, the spam filtering isn’t as good, and it has all kinds of unintuitive UI quirks and gaps.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thrower123 5y ago
Damn, hopefully it is more than two or three years out. I'm enjoying Outlook being one of the most stable and least resource-hungry applications that I run on a daily basis. Also, if it's going to be a packaged-up version of the Outlook webapp, I'm going to lose the global unread mail folder, which is going to kill me, given the way my inbox folders and rules are set up by customer.
brailsafe 5y ago
I'm pretty ok with emails just being barely more than text thank you

detritus 5y ago

Going a bit further back, IE 5 and 6 were the best browser by far. Strange for me to think that my now-beloved Firefox has its heritage embedded in Netscape, which at the same time as IE5 was an absolute pig. - ed for some reason I have it in mind as IE5.5 specifically that was The Great IE.

munk-a 5y ago
I have a version of myself aged in their twenties and working in web development that really wants to stab anyone believing that IE6 was the best browser. I won't argue that it wasn't decent at launch, but MS kept support for that browser around way too long and failed to actually roll out support for new features that customers desired. I believe it was the era of IE6 specifically that led to the proliferation of top-right-corner.jpg which was an absolute abomination.
- detritus 5y ago
  Oh, don't get me wrong - it was a Trojan Horse, and my first ever web browsing experience was on Navigator, so it was a hard-hearted appreciation at the time. But from my stand point then, It Just Worked.
  - ido 5y ago
    Same for me - I started browsing the web on Mosaic and quickly switched to Netscape. I hung on during the Netscape 4.x days but at some point couldn't deny how much better IE was (I think maybe even IE 4 was already as good or better than Netscape). I switched to IE until the Mozilla suit released and later on switched to Firefox 0.something - it was amazing how fast it was compared to both IE6 and Mozilla.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      Some time around 2001 or 2002 I bought Opera (with tabs!) and that just made the internet usable.
- 5y ago

saos 5y ago

> But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. My biggest ever frustration.

major505 5y ago

no, not really. If I could I would be the first to thrown it in a deep hole in the ground and seal with concrete to make sure it never rises again.

userbinator 5y ago

If they took the Edge rendering engine (which is really like Chromium or some close approximation of it now) and put it in the IE UI instead of the opposite, I think that would get a lot of praise from me and probably many others including all the Google-drunk web developers. Those who like IE and prefer it to other browsers are doing so despite its horrible rendering engine.

fomine3 5y ago
I doubt such users had used Chrome frame instead of Chrome.
Ndymium 5y ago
The Edge rendering engine is Blink, because Edge is a fork of Chromium now.

gerdesj 5y ago

"but it was our terrible browser." Don't you dare include me in "our" 8) My first browser was telnet (1992ish) From 1993 onwards it was all a bit weird in internets land. For me the golden time for wwwbly_internets was around 2000-5 or so. /. was still (just) worth reading, FB was still a bulge in MZ's trousers. Google was cool, Amazon was clever, Apple was cool. The www was still interesting - US frontier like. I am of course joking. Today's www is not the same as that in say 2000. Google is not cool, Apple is not cool, Facebook is unpleasant, Amazon is not cool and quite odd.

Laforet 5y ago
eBay has changed very little since then if that helps, however PayPal might as well be unrecognisable.
- lbriner 5y ago
  I often think that EBay are outdated in almost every regard. Their UI is confusing, spaghetti code, an obvious mixture of old pages and new pages and until recently, still seemed to use some bootstrap dll for requests. I guess your damned if you update and damned if you don't.

underscore_ku 5y ago

not my browser! i use Linux - Chromium or Firefox

Baeocystin 5y ago

I work in small business IT, and I literally have to use IE11 on a weekly basis to interface with some shoddy something. And it's not necessarily just old stuff, either- there are brand new NVRs and cameras going in today that require IE and some godforsaken ActiveX control to work. IE is going to be around for a long time.

etripe 5y ago
Isn't that also what people said about Flash?
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  Yes, and they were right. I have to deal with Flash regularly, too. So much so that I keep a VM around for solely that purpose.

augustk 5y ago

> Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. Maybe that's why my replies from Thunderbird using interspersed posting shows up empty for some Outlook users.

OakNinja 5y ago

I was helping a friend out with html email templates a while ago, and it was like time traveling back to 2001 Geocities web development. Table hell…

horsawlarway 5y ago

> But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere. I feel you, and if you're an enterprise user still on the last LTSB release (1803) then yes - Outlook is still using a trident based browser. If you're on 1903 or above, though, my understanding is that you're now on a WebView2 engine running roughly what's in Edge right now: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ I know for a fact that our company's product for Outlook (an addin.js extension) has suddenly started working for customers in Outlook when they upgrade, and we're not IE11 compatible.

tresvert 5y ago

I agree with this one; it will always be etched on our hearts. The good thing is that even though IE 11 will retire, Microsoft Edge is here to stay. It's even better than other browsers, for sure. I tried using it, and I love the browsing experience.