8 ms·

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.

• 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.
  • zymhan 5y ago
    > Apple's Mail app is one of the few modern mail clients that can render modern HTML/CSS That's kinda funny given how my Calendar.app event notes are just full of unparsed HTML tags Though I don't know which is worse, putting HTML in calendar invite descriptions, or refusing to render basic tags.
    • monsieurbanana 5y ago
      I vote for putting HTML in calendar invites. As worst thing, I precise.
  • derefr 5y ago
    Given that email is MIME (i.e. you can add multiple “bodies” to a message, with different content-types, and the email client will select the best one it can render), you’d think we could just come up with a new content-type for email meaning “HTML, but for real”, and add that to email in addition to the current “HTML, but sucky” semantics we get from text/html-typed bodies. For a while, people would be sending both text/html and text/html-for-real, but eventually we’d maybe be able to switch to only sending text/html-for-real (while also continuing to send text/plain for fallback.)
    • blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      CSS grid email designs would be great, but we'd also get an avalanche of nightmare canvas-tag spam...
      • toastal 5y ago
        Maybe more people will then demand plaintext as we come full circle
      • ratww 5y ago
        You can have one without another! Apple Mail supports grid, but doesn’t support canvas or script tags.
      • akx 5y ago
        A canvas tag won't do much without scripts, and I really don't believe any client would allow running scripts from email...
    • smichel17 5y ago
      I wish people sent text/plain as a fallback for text/html...
    • drewzero1 5y ago
      > a new content-type for email meaning “HTML, but for real” text/email Mozilla/5.0 (KHTML, like Gecko)
  • Vinnl 5y ago
    AFAIK Thunderbird just uses Gecko - I wonder whether it's not running into similar problems.
• 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