16 ms·

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

• ChrisRR 4mo ago
  What is outlook doing that it didn't already do under windows xp? Surely it should be blazing fast by now
• junglistguy 4mo ago
  [dead]
• emsign 4mo ago
  powered by AI
• Adam-Hincu 4mo ago
  2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
• anthk 4mo ago
  Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.
  • j16sdiz 4mo ago
    npm love this comment
  • vajrabum 4mo ago
    Is the new Outlook client a JS/Electron app?
    • canucker2016 4mo ago
      The article mentions that new Outlook uses a Webview2 control as the UI. You can call it JS/Webview. Similar to Electron, but using an MS Edge browser window control as the webview control instead of Google Chrome. It's lighter weight than Electron, if you consider that Webview2 ships with Windows and is shared with other Webview2 consumers as opposed to Electron apps which each ship with their own self-contained web browser.
• 1970-01-01 4mo ago
  Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
  • MichaelZuo 4mo ago
    I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010. Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
    • 1970-01-01 4mo ago
      Mostly memory management and 64-bit support finally being on-par with the 32-bit versions, but it's hard to argue the nuance overall.
      • deburo 4mo ago
        The switch to hardware-accelerated rendering was poor. It's still causing issues today. Is it the graphic drivers' fault or their poor implementation? Who knows, but they also disabled the switch that allowed to turn it off, which is just classic Microsoft being annoying.
    • airstrike 4mo ago
      I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
    • j16sdiz 4mo ago
      XLOOKUP was introduced in 2019. I thought it was a great update
    • Yossarrian22 4mo ago
      You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
    • Someone1234 4mo ago
      I wouldn't trust an "Excel guy" who said that, they aren't staying current/using new functionality. Just off the top of my head: IFNA, FORMULATEXT, DAYS, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, XLOOKUP/XMATCH, FILTER, UNIQUE, LET, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER, LAMBDA, et al. But my favorite improvement is the "don't intentionally corrupt CSVs" options found in Settings -> Data -> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything). Only took them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still. Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
• netsharc 4mo ago
  Started a new job, with Windows 11. notepad.exe now takes 3 to 4 seconds to load on my work system... (even after closing the last tab and reopening the program). Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
  • itopaloglu83 4mo ago
    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.
    • LollipopYakuza 4mo ago
      I have had the same thought for years. I guess their monopoly makes them able not to care about quality (and does not depend on it). A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.
      • itopaloglu83 4mo ago
        At some point I assume somebody had to explain why the start menu is 40-50 times slower than previous releases. Or they simply vibe-code something and ship it not caring what they created.
    • Telaneo 4mo ago
      Big assumption there that they even have an end goal. Given that making Windows' market share is more or less impossible to make any bigger at this point (every human on earth has used Windows in some capacity by this point; there are no new markets to expand to, the only option left is to not bleed old users, but that requires significant effort and a good strategy), they've opted to not really bother with Windows and shifted focus completely, leaving Windows out to dry, resulting in this and gestures vaguely at Windows 11 and everything else Windows.
    • tennfown 4mo ago
      At thsi point i think the current goal is the annoy the tiny ants in the consumer market who complain and are a nuisance , but don’t make them much money compared is the big boys in the enterprise world.
• patates 4mo ago
  > Outlook is based on WebView2, and like all web apps, it’s slow Fastmail also has a web based email client, which is as fast as (if not faster than) Outlook Classic. The new Outlook is just bad. Load order is wrong, it renders everything on every window, loads unnecessary data, etc. Plain annoying.
  • olex 4mo ago
    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.
    • robertlagrant 4mo ago
      You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
      • sgt 4mo ago
        That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load. It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
        • zaphar 4mo ago
          Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.
          • 4mo ago
• nticompass 4mo ago
  Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
  • marcosdumay 4mo ago
    Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
    • nticompass 4mo ago
      Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
      • Sharlin 4mo ago
        It's Copilot all the way down.
      • marcosdumay 4mo ago
        There are 2 that are a bunch of software. But AFAIK, they have the same Outlook inside.
  • Sesse__ 4mo ago
    It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
  • aboardRat4 4mo ago
    Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe
    • nticompass 4mo ago
      .vbs
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
• m132 4mo ago
  And to think that the "old" Outlook's splash screen is there for a reason: it used to take a while to open before SSDs became commonplace! Windows in general used to be usable on HDDs; SSDs would blow everyone's pants off making everything open instantly. These days we have 20+ Gbps SSDs without the AHCI latency tax and they're no longer enough to open an e-mail. THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
  • reaperducer 4mo ago
    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.
    • big85 4mo ago
      I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
      • BitwiseFool 4mo ago
        It needs to load in all those recommendations for you to ignore.
    • exe34 4mo ago
      I remember the late nineties and early naughties, when I used to type faster than Windows could cope with, and it still never lost a keystroke.
    • ryandvm 4mo ago
      You're right, but it's not just Microsoft. I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers. This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about. Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit? Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
• knorker 4mo ago
  > like all web apps, it’s slow No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts: 1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too. 2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps. I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate. This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant. Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.
  • AshamedCaptain 4mo ago
    What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
    • knorker 4mo ago
      Most top of mind was this tragedy that Microsoft somehow thinks is "good" and not something to be ashamed of at all: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialog-faster-cleaner-and-more-capable/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialo...
  • itopaloglu83 4mo ago
    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.
    • xmddmx 4mo ago
      Another way (which happens to be correct) to say tenth of a second is 100 000 000 (one hundred million) nanoseconds. You were off by a factor of 1000!
      • itopaloglu83 4mo ago
        Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.
• bogometer 4mo ago
  Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
• mc32 4mo ago
  They so screwed Outlook. The stupid thing refuses to respond after switching to a diff network or SSID till it’s completed some synchronization of some kind. The stupid app refuses to come into focus. I really don’t need the freshest view at once. Maybe I just need to look at an open email you dog of an app! Why did they castrate Outlook? Does MS hate itself? What in the name of shit are they thinking? Who does this make happy?
  • InitialLastName 4mo ago
    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.
• FinnKuhn 4mo ago
  The "free" version of outlook that replaced Mail is so bad that it made me finally switch to Thunderbird and I don't see myself going back anytime soon. The only thing I'm missing sometimes is the Copilot integration, but copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook...
  • navigate8310 4mo ago
    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.
    • FinnKuhn 4mo ago
      Apparently, they did a rework of the interface a few years ago. https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/thunderbird-development/codebase-overview/mail-front-end.md https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/th... and https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbi...
    • Telaneo 4mo ago
      I don't even think Thunderbird has gotten any significant speed improvements over the years (unlike Firefox). The only real reason it's gotten better on that front is that processors and I/O have gotten faster. Meanwhile, Outlook as managed to take every morsel of improved hardware, and squandered it. I've never had problems with Thunderbird on that front, but then again, I've never had email accounts with 100k emails archived.
    • Joe_Cool 4mo ago
      I really like Betterbird. It's basically ESR Thunderbird + a few fixes. If you want mail to just work and updates going smoothly it's the solution.
• fg137 4mo ago
  The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows. I see a freaking loading screen with the Outlook logo for 5 seconds before the window is updated with the meeting name along with a button to dismiss it. Yes that's everything in there. How does Microsoft think this is ok?
  • BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
    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.
    • IIsi50MHz 4mo ago
      Quite often when I use a 1990s system, I encounter several things that are instantaneous, while modern machines take several seconds. Like, sending an empty folder to the bin: Win 10 this afternoon took seconds to display a dialog box with no content, the a couple seconds to add a progressbar, then a second to add the cancel button, then multiple seconds to finish showing progress. But at home a 1991s system with System 7 completes the same task instantly without needing a progressbar.
• instakill 4mo ago
  new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
  • Ekaros 4mo ago
    Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
    • stackskipton 4mo ago
      Yea, everyone is trashing on Outlook web while Gmail is over there doing same exact shit. Even worse, Gmail has never well integrated all its features. Apparently having easy access to my full calendar requires a new tab.
  • herbst 4mo ago
    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.
• lenerdenator 4mo ago
  Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
• SoKamil 4mo ago
  Outlook for Mac is surprisingly good, though. Every interaction feels (and is) native. Kudos to the team. I think this is same team that maintains Office Suite for Mac. I hope to see Teams for Mac in the future. Current Teams app is dogshit.
  • e12e 4mo ago
    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.
    • e12e 4mo ago
      Correction - not "my" but "mu" (mail utils): https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ Btw, anyone still reading/participating mailing lists? From MacOS? Have you found a reasonable client? I'm not even going to try with Outlook.
  • lawlorino 4mo ago
    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).
    • SoKamil 4mo ago
      Good question. There are two versions of Outlook on macOS. https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Outlook/outlook-for-mac https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Outlook/outlook-for-mac Which one did you use?
• DaedalusII 4mo ago
  its faster to use an LLM + MCP (chatgpt or claude integration cloud integration) to search your email than to use the search field in the web browser now its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
• nzoschke 4mo ago
  Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape? This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out. I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science. I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support. https://housecat.com/ https://housecat.com/ The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
  • stackskipton 4mo ago
    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.
    • navigate8310 4mo ago
      I hate this type of disguised ad paired with a running commentary on important issues.
    • nzoschke 4mo ago
      Fair feedback and sentiment. As I build this out there's actually less and less AI in the product and more good old-fashioned UX, writing and data entry tools, and automations. Some examples... We're simply bringing a CRM CRUD form into an email thread, populated from email sender / domain, for the end user to review and submit. You can add your own notes into a thread, and copy / paste from Similarly good pre-defined templates with variables perform way better than AI generated drafts. Context is indeed key. The person at their email inbox has most of the context in their head, they need good tools to organize that context down for their future self and their team. AI can help but its really about just building a great tool for the operator.
      • 4mo ago
• stainablesteel 4mo ago
  microsoft is an amazing study in managed decline that people still buy this, businesses still rely on their infrastructure, and their stock is somehow world-class is outstanding for the fact that its operating system can't do what middle school level coders can accomplish
• Sharlin 4mo ago
  The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.
  • rcarmo 4mo ago
    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).
    • Sharlin 4mo ago
      On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API. (Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
• sgt 4mo ago
  Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow. https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-1-2gb-ram-on-windows-11-even-as-microsoft-kills-web-app-slop/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
• zkmon 4mo ago
  Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago. The issue is, as the product continues to generate revenue, the product team continues to get funding and they are forced to add bloat as new features. Same with security and compliance standards at companies. You keep pouring more money, and you keep getting more fort walls and dungeons, without any regard to productivity and performance impact.
  • sznio 4mo ago
    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.
    • trinix912 4mo ago
      From my experience using Outlook, they could keep the Outlook team for bugfixes only and still have enough work for the next 5 years just improving/fixing the classic version.
      • someguyiguess 4mo ago
        This matches my experience as well. I see no lack of work to be done without necessitating additional features.
      • zkmon 4mo ago
        The will save bug-fixing as a work-reserve or future job security, and keep adding more visible/flashy new buggy/bloated features.
  • heisenbit 4mo ago
    You forgot to mention that all the people who made the original product great left and all the ones which could make the successor great did not join.
• jasonvorhe 4mo ago
  Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
• BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
  Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    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.
  • projektfu 4mo ago
    Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.
    • someguyiguess 4mo ago
      The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.
      • bel8 4mo ago
        Instant for me but I have a beefy CPU Ryzen 9800X3D and some crazy nvme. And most important: no corporate spyware disguised as anti-virus, in this machine.
      • Joe_Cool 4mo ago
        Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.
        • kalleboo 4mo ago
          How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?
• botanrice 4mo ago
  Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.
  • BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
    I think that's caused by OneDrive. Which was the "shove down your throat" flavour of a couple of generations ago. F OneDrive.
    • botanrice 4mo ago
      yea I do think you're right. Really dislike that they've truly stuffed it down as everything getting auto-uploaded to OneDrive. Would be happy to use it to store certain docs but can't control how work sets it up ya know? stuck suffering instead lmao
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo ago
  Decisions of a company with no competition.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    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.
    • qwerpy 4mo ago
      It's not so bad here in Orange County. City/county politics are more balanced and provide pretty good counterweights to the state party. It's much better than the Seattle area, which truly has uniparty rule and it shows. People are less civil and tolerant there, crime and schools are worse, quality of life is lower. I agree with the parent comment though. MS just doesn't have meaningful competition for Windows and Office, and the terrible software quality/experience is what we get.
• bonoboTP 4mo ago
  Why are you not on thunderbird yet? Why do you get Windows notifications? Are you using Windows? I don't understand how there are people who can notice such things but still use windows in 2026. Also, please don't write with AI. This post was written with AI.
  • emdash 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • yndoendo 4mo ago
    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.
• complianceowll 4mo ago
  Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
• mawadev 4mo ago
  If i was in charge at MS, I'd go full return to monke and put a lot of devs into making winforms work great with 4k and high DPI. Then rebuild the most critical apps with winforms using a new layouting engine and some wpf concepts carried over. Nothing new or fancy, just old but gold.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 4mo ago
    History shows that there have been many Microsoft executives with a vision of building a new, perfect GUI toolkit. They all were released half done and quasi supported to this day.
    • mawadev 4mo ago
      I mean like you take the old thing and enhance it a bit but dont make a new thing from scratch because the idea and architecture has always been perfect. Most GUI toolkits from microsoft are drilled for ease of use so you dont have to have many devs to get something running (looking at dual way data binding and xaml). Imho thats the wrong approach, make it perfect for experts and approachable for juniors, winforms was very easy to click together, WPF not so much, too much framework magic.
• vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
  It's really hard to understand how these trillion dollar companies somehow can't afford to maintain quality apps. Seems every new Office release makes things worse. I assume the WebView2 makes things a little easier for devs but how much are they really saving at the expense of quality? And I have no idea what the product managers are doing. They are certainly not thinking about improving the product. The new Outlook and Teams feel like they are being hacked together by a bunch of interns that are trying out Scrum.
• einpoklum 4mo ago
  "Old" Outlook is slow enough as well. Especially with Corporate "security" software.
  • ale42 4mo ago
    You will then see the new one in the same situation...
• shevy-java 4mo ago
  Win11 may be the best thing for Linux. After all, people who are pissed by Win11 may eventually change operating systems. Now if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ...
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    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.
    • akimbostrawman 4mo ago
      Yes, however KDE plasma is much closer to modern windows and makes it look like a toy.
  • akimbostrawman 4mo ago
    >Now if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ... Tell me you have only used gnome without telling me
• JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?
  • SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.
• aboardRat4 4mo ago
  Is anybody still using email in 2026? Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
  • kevinsync 4mo ago
    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.
  • ThinkingGuy 4mo ago
    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)
  • jubilanti 4mo ago
    Do you have a job?
    • aboardRat4 4mo ago
      Yes. I don't live in the US though.
  • ale42 4mo ago
    > Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal. Great, instead of having a single, standard and interoperable way to communicate (albeit with its defaults), now we need to have 5, 6, 7 different closed systems that can't speak with each other, most of which require a working smartphone in order to even have an "address". What a wonderful evolution...
• lbriner 4mo ago
  They have enough employees to build native apps that run super quick but are still seduced by the web portability argument which, as we all know, is mostly untrue even now and which introduces all kinds of non-deterministic latencies/errors, which cannot all be handled neatly. To be honest, this is the same in almost all apps that have any more than 10 developers working on them (my estimate!). Death by dependencies and a lack of coherent design. As someone else said, though, some things like fastmail work OK in the browser so it is possible.
  • bluedino 4mo ago
    > They have enough employees to build native apps They'd screw those up as well.
    • frollogaston 4mo ago
      But they didn't, Office was native for Mac and Windows and was done pretty well
  • eudamoniac 4mo ago
    The platform is not the issue. Competent engineering teams could blow this out of the water with a single threaded jquery web app.
    • Escapado 4mo ago
      I have to agree here but I would like to add: every single web app I have ever had to build or was part of building was heavily biased and towards adding more features and exorbitant amounts of tracking that me or the other engineers had to practically beg the product owners to do do perf optimisations or reduce technical debt that accumulates after a couple of years, even with lots of low hanging fruits to pick from.
    • frollogaston 4mo ago
      Idk, Gmail got really slow too. Also how do they not have infinite scroll in 2026?
• askonomm 4mo ago
  At this point I’m convinced that the only people working at Microsoft are those who nobody else would hire. There is no way a self-respecting person would be ok creating garbage like this, day in and day out.
  • JellyBeanThief 4mo ago
    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.
    • askonomm 4mo ago
      Both can be true at the same time. You don’t have to be extremely passionate about your job and go above and beyond, you just have to be competent.
• Telaneo 4mo ago
  I'm reminded of the Teams team making a comparison video between their old and new versions, which only went to show that the new version was also really slow (9 seconds). https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4 https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4
  • christophilus 4mo ago
    “Incredible, a mere 35 billion cycles to start up!” The comments on that video are perfect.
• tiahura 4mo ago
  I wonder how many MS engineers are lamenting how superior Classic Outlook is for AI integration. COM and VBA let cc do pretty much everything.
• exabrial 4mo ago
  Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?
  • jwagenet 4mo ago
    Some of us use software that is windows only eg any non-software engineering discipline.
  • NetMageSCW 4mo ago
    Because the purpose of an OS is to to be an application, but to run other applications- most of which are not on Linux.
• blueferret 4mo ago
  At this point I would pay up front (one-time fee) for a Windows email client that rendered fast, worked with multiple account types including Outlook, had a nice simple interface so I can focus on the messages, and didn't have AI stuffed into it. Seems like we just don't have that.
  • rf15 4mo ago
    Build one? sounds like there is demand!
• teekert 4mo ago
  New Outlook also does not do IMAP for me at all. Even though it says it does, sending you on a nice time wasting goose hunt. Thank you MS.
  • reddalo 4mo ago
    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.
• darig 4mo ago
  [dead]
• LetsGetTechnicl 4mo ago
  Web apps are a scourge.
• expedition32 4mo ago
  I honestly don't even care so much because I do everything on my phone these days but yes it has become apparent that Microsoft hates Office.
• perarneng 4mo ago
  JavaScript needs to do whatever JavaScript needs to do. It's incredible when we have AI assistants that slow shit like that still ships in products affecting millions of users. Imagine how much totally wasted energy that costs just because the companies are cheap. Just port it to Rust and run it as webassembly at least.
• AzzieElbab 4mo ago
  Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?
• ksec 4mo ago
  That is why I said the 2x improvement about Webview they said earlier doesn't matter. And I believe the 10sec already accounted for the 2x improvements. >the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference. In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat. Why isn't it 30 to 60MB. Now 150MB is still so much better than 600MB. I am not sure if Native will ever win. I do wonder if we could somehow make webview, or may be a subset of webview that is as fast as native.
  • Telaneo 4mo ago
    > 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.
• jp191919 4mo ago
  New Outlook doesn't even have feature parity with Outlook Classic.
• fwlr 4mo ago
  As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”
  • reddalo 4mo ago
    I wish we had more Casey Muratoris and less Sam Altmans.
  • rafterydj 4mo ago
    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.
    • fwlr 4mo ago
      I highly recommend consuming Casey Muratori content, particularly if it’s blue shirt Casey standing in a black void with yellow handwriting. Those are his high-production serious lectures, and they’re worth every minute. (It took me a while to find his YouTube channel because it’s called “MollyRocket”.)
  • frollogaston 4mo ago
    I remember them being dog slow. People used to joke about loading bars going backwards. But Windows did peak with 7.
• dspillett 4mo ago
  https://archive.is/pcRNR https://archive.is/pcRNR for those who prefer minimal stalking as they travel the web. [even when the top-level tracking preferences look full off, if you dig down you'll find some “part” on, and you can't set them full-off (you are blocked from disabling tracking by Amazon at least)] [Mental note to self: add “windowslatest.com” to “are you really sure you want to go there?” DNS greylist]
• Eric_WVGG 4mo ago
  hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!) My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it. My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it. So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?
  • rafterydj 4mo ago
    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.
    • bluGill 4mo ago
      There are plenty of cross platform options. I write with Qt for example.
      • rafterydj 4mo ago
        Yes but Qt comes with the drawbacks of being tied to Qt. With Electron + React, you'd be able to rip out any components you need and place them in other web apps. The browser is (psychologically) avoiding vendor dependencies to a greater degree than other options.
        • bluGill 4mo ago
          You are tied to web and react. You can substitute react for something else (I suppose) but still tied to that. I know of a few other cross platform toolkits if you don't like Qt, but in all cases you quickly become tied to it.
• cable_ 4mo ago
  On the subject of Microsoft gripes, MS Purview removing focus from a text box for several seconds every time I paste something is driving me insane. Was just enabled recently at my org, but apparently has been a problem since 2024 at the earliest: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/answers/questions/1791527/microsoft-purview-extension-for-edge-popups-when-p https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/answers/questions/1791527/...
• sreekanth850 4mo ago
  Hardware has become insanely fast, while software has become absurdly inefficient. During the Windows XP era, I use to browse the internet even on dial-up connections, use Yahoo Messenger, and run everything on a desktop with just 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk, everything worked, but today basic use on Windows often need a minimum 8gb ram. I wish I could go back.
• storus 4mo ago
  I couldn't even get new Outlook to sync with some email accounts. And my Office 2019 licenses will stop working next month due to a cert expiry Trojan horse baked in by Microsoft. Why does MS think I will ever want to pay them for anything ever again?
• jl6 4mo ago
  > Speaking of memory, the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference. They really picked the wrong timeline in which to 4x RAM usage for no benefit.
• reddalo 4mo ago
  The funny thing is that the Outlook client for Mac is a native app and it's way better than the Windows client.
• htx80nerd 4mo ago
  I have ~3 lower/mid range Linux laptops and 1x mid/high range windows gaming laptop. It's amazing how slow the windows machine is despite being an absolute beast compared to the linux machines, which have way worse specs.
• classified 4mo ago
  The only thing not slowing down is the speed of enshittification at Microslop.
• Razengan 4mo ago
  How else would we know Microsoft is still Microsoft? It's the "blink twice if you're okay" test for them. On a side note, how long did it take for IBM to go from being everywhere to becoming irrelevant?
• Melatonic 4mo ago
  Even the damn Artemis astronauts on the way to the moon had to call home to troubleshoot Outlook
• financetechbro 4mo ago
  New outlook also pre loads ads and it takes a few seconds for the paid verification to go through before the ads go away. Very frustrating clicking on the first email at load time only to realize it is an ad. Just the icing on the sh*t cake.
• ska80 4mo ago
  enshitification
• deweywsu 4mo ago
  What was really behind the push to get everything browser based in the first place? Is this all to make everything cloud based, software as a service, or did some exec see a demo of Windows 8 and think "web is the future" and over-rotate?
  • jen20 4mo ago
    The push is that web developers are easy to find, and native software developers barely event exist anymore (and if they do can get paid to work on things like trading software, though web is even picking up there!). Microsoft don't even _have_ a reasonable desktop UI stack, having been through at least 4-5 which gained minimal traction before being abandoned. The last successful one was Windows Forms, which is what I'd pick up today if I ever had to touch Windows again.
  • jarjoura 4mo ago
    Turns out the browser is an incredibly sophisticated and highly performant layout engine that works on almost every platform out there. Native UI frameworks are always going to be more efficient and let you access more of the hardware, but it's more expensive to maintain 2 or 3 separate codebases.
  • fluoridation 4mo ago
    The least cynical argument is internationalization. Rendering engines already implement robust text layout when multiple languages are involved, so it makes sense to leverage it. The more cynical argument is that it's easier to find web designers than desktop UI designers. The more-cynical-still argument is the one you said.
  • frollogaston 4mo ago
    Some of it is anti-piracy, and it's also cheaper to support
• jerf 4mo ago
  Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do real work on, and they resolved that enough for the market. I wish someone would give them the performance religion. The saying that what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away is pretty old, but I will defend Microsoft in the past with the observation that, you know, 32MB of RAM to 64MB is a pretty small change in the modern sense. It doesn't take very many bitmaps or fonts or colors to burn through that sort of increase in power, even at the older resolutions of the past. There's a reason we don't all build our UIs to run on 386-class machines. But it's gotten freaking absurd. I've got a 8-core monster that cranks up to near 5GHz at the drop of a hat, more RAM than I could have dreamed of in the 1990s, and a disk with numbers that I would have asked if you were accidentally talking about RAM back then (NVME SSDs still have ~500-1000x the latency, but the modern SSD wins handily on bandwidth). Modern code has more to do, more fonts, more graphics, more Unicode, but still it has gotten really absurd. 10 seconds on a modern computer is a lot of time. 12,000 frames of a AAA game ought to be enough computational power to check my email, not to have my email checker still choking and stuttering as it barely manages to start up.
• warumdarum 4mo ago
  A pool of notifaction-agents trying to upsale copilot or staying quiet, is stateful aka a turing machine. If you use enough of these agents they can draw and behave like any software e.g. outlook
• drudolph914 4mo ago
  I will say, a positive thing that has come out of msft's 20ish year run of consistent incompetence and piss poor leadership, is that there are quite a few former msft engineers (now retired) that are posting great lectures and educational content on youtube. also, idk when, but the talent level of a "msft engineer" from 90s to early 2000s feels like they runs laps around the msft engineers of today. it's hard to not feel that the suits cannibalized what was at one point an extremely profitable company with great engineering culture for nothing but shortsighted gains
• mococa 4mo ago
  It should be based on Team's code base :-)
• mlmonkey 4mo ago
  Microsoft has always been careless about performance. Two anecdotes: A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft (long ago). One day I was complaining to him about some package that Microsoft had put out. "It's so slow!" I said. He replied, nonchalantly: "buy Intel stock. People will have to upgrade their PCs!" Second one is from about 15 years ago. At one of the local meetups, I was chatting with a long-lost friend who worked for Yahoo. He was describing their recently-concluded Search deal with Microsoft, and how it worked in practice. This was an issue he had raised with Microsoft engineers and gotten no traction on their side. (This is all from memory). Basically, he described how a search request from an European user was handled by Yahoo Search. So, say someone goes to "search.yahoo.de" and enters a search term and it triggers a request at some Yahoo server in an EU datacenter. According to the deal, that would be forwarded to a Microsoft server, based in Virginia. Now, since the request was from EU, the Microsoft server would turn around and make a request to a MS server based in EU. Which would then respond with the search results to the MS server in VA. Which would then send the response back to the Yahoo server in EU. So, basically, 4 cross-Atlantic hops for one search request. He claimed latency figures of around 1500ms, when their internal goal was to keep latency below 300ms (after which it becomes noticeable and hurts metrics?). But when he brought up this massive latency spike to his counterparts in MS, they just shrugged it off.
  • bflesch 4mo ago
    They routed the search to Virginia for surveillance, I hope that is clear to you.
• wolvoleo 4mo ago
  The mobile app does this too. When you open a notification it first brings you to an old email you already had open and it takes a number of seconds before that's replaced by the one you were notified for.
• mulderc 4mo ago
  I have always been amazed at how outlook just seems to always get worse. When I first used it decades ago I found it awful but it had a logic to it, now it is worse and makes no sense in the current world of options.
• rayiner 4mo ago
  We’re still on old Outlook and I’m not sure what we are going to do when Microsoft cancels it. The New Outlook preview release came out 4 years ago. If it was ever going to not be a piece of crap it would’ve happened by now.
• cik 4mo ago
  This year, for the first time since 2006 I've have Outlook and friends in my life. I run Linux, so naturally I turned to firefox.. Not a win. Fair, I use Chrome only for these products. Dear Lord, how has the software gotten this much worse in 19 years? I thought that Thunderbird was bloated and awful... until I tried Outlook, in a browser, on Linux. Now, the Thunderbird experience is shockingly pleasurable, compared. Don't even get me started on the horror that is trying to mix left-to-right and right-to-left languages within the same document. OpenOffice figured this out a decade ago. Google Docs has done this perfectly since the beginning. When I learned that it was genuinely this bad on Windows too, my mind was blown. I don't understand how this is possible.
  • krnrrr 4mo ago
    Thunderbird was not _that_ bad, tbh. But none could compete with theBat!
• jakeinspace 4mo ago
  My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.
• rcleveng 4mo ago
  Congrats to the new outlook team on the performance improvements, I certain it used to take 30 seconds to do it, and they've cut it to 10s !! But seriously, can we please make desktop productivity apps not suck on windows? I started programming on windows, old school Win32 with a little MFC. Still have the super thick MFC book from MikeB somewhere in the closet. It was better than the alternatives at the time. Now I look at the windows developer site and I can't even figure out what happened since I stopped Win32 programming at around 2004. It's a total train wreck of abandoned technology, each worse than the previous ones. Office (and to some degree visual studio), used to be the lighthouse, best in breed application, often using api's that were not yet public and styles that were not yet adopted. I remember buying component libraries that emulated these to make better looking and performing apps. I'd look at windows again if they would make apps not suck and be ones that the industry strives to emulate. Without that, Linux or Mac is just as good (actually better since they have decent userlands).
• modriano 4mo ago
  Up until 2019, Windows was my daily driver and had been for the prior ~20. years. I had been regularly ssh-ing into Linux machines, but it didn't seem like a place I could live. Then, in 2019, I built a PC and, wanting to get more proficient in Linux environments, I made it a dual boot setup with a Ubuntu desktop partition and a Windows partition, expecting I'd inevitably get frustrated on the Linux partition by sidequests debugging driver issues or setting up peripherals, unproductive yak-shaving stuff. I had to google a setting or two over the first couple days, but other than that, everything just worked on the Linux partition. Things opened quickly, things installed easily, and things I was worried about (e.g. nvidia and printer drivers) were either automatic or a one-time step so small I don't remember it. After a couple weeks, I noticed there hadn't been a single moment where I had to switch to the Windows partition, and a month after that I reformatted the Windows partition ssd and added the storage to the Linux partition. If you have considered switching to Linux and worried that it would be a chore, give it a shot (if you have the freedom to choose). It has been polished and ready since at least 2019. I have to use a Windows machine for work and, like this New Outlook issue shows, MSFT has concluded most users can't or won't leave so there's no margin in improving UX and some margin in doing things that make UX much worse. I don't think I'll elect to have a personal Windows machine ever again in my life.
  • rwyinuse 4mo ago
    I agree. Sometimes one needs Windows for some legacy software, but for 99% of use cases Linux works, is faster and respects your privacy more.
  • justsomehnguy 4mo ago
    My favourite part of these success stories when Nautilus can,t replicate some functionality which Windows has since forever, eg copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep. Sure, someone who uses their computer as a glorified SSH terminal with an occasional Google.Docs edition wouldn't see a problem, but I, who works everyday - do.
    • kaladin-jasnah 4mo ago
      It's reductive to say that people who aren't "copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep" are not "working everyday." While Windows fits your use case, some people do use SSH for their real work as well, even if it is simpler.
• thot_experiment 4mo ago
  I use Office 97 for this reason, it's like 400mb installed and everything happens instantly. Grab a copy off archive.org!
  • boobsbr 4mo ago
    I'm more of a Lotus guy.
• __natty__ 4mo ago
  > Windows 11 ships with two versions of Outlook. There is Outlook Classic, the long-running Win32 desktop app built for power users, and there is the new Outlook, which Microsoft is pushing as the future of email on Windows. The newer one is built on WebView2 and is, in essence, a browser window that loads Outlook.com. If you have ever used both side by side, you already know which one feels faster and which one does not. This is bizarre. Kyle Rubenok, according to his LinkedIn and GitHub @krubenok, is the senior manager for the outlook product. Isn't he taking any responsibility for how poorly his product performs? In many regular companies, such a manager would be fired for managing a product into decline. I guess I don't understand how big US corporations work.
• KoolKat23 4mo ago
  New outlook is quite honestly a joke. I tried to like it but went back to the old outlook as crucial features were missing. Simple things such as shift+f3 to change case to upper/lower/sentence case. This I believe stems from spell check being missing, another big issue for those with custom dictionaries. Poorly implemented template and template file management, I could go on... If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.
  • NetMageSCW 4mo ago
    I had no idea shift+F3 was there. If I even thought to look for such a feature I would assume it is in the right-click context menu and wouldn’t need a shortcut for it since I would use it once a decade. Now I wonder what kind of environment you work in where that is needed (and I work in an environment where a critical application requires Caps-Lock on for any extended usage). This shows the problem with people who think the features in Office apps that they don’t use are bloat. If you made a new app using the 80% of features all the users regularly used, you’d discover you need 100% of those features because 20% of the users use a different set of obscure features.
    • KoolKat23 4mo ago
      This is absolutely true. Perhaps Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner, their catch-all marketing racking up significant tech debt. But in the same breath I honestly can't see what the value proposition would be for their office applications without it. Regarding your first paragraph, if you're curious, I work for a multinational where we deal with company names, this is kept uniformly in uppercase in our internal system, globally there's too many variations and it gets visually messy (such as GmbH, there's also user errors to consider). However emailing external third parties, it looks a little unprofessional sending this information ALL IN CAPS.
• tacker2000 4mo ago
  The latest version of "Legacy Outlook" on Mac has a huge bug now: "Replying to or forwarding an email does not include the original message in the email body in legacy Outlook for Mac" [1] So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ? Who knows... If I have to use this new version for longer than 2 weeks I am switching to some other client. And also, who knows, maybe they are purposefully inserting these show-stopping bugs to get people to switch. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/replying-to-or-forwarding-an-email-does-not-include-the-original-message-in-the-email-body-in-legacy-outlook-for-mac-2aff3768-e7c5-4f5e-90ab-2e3976f424e8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/replying-to-or-for...
  • n0on3 4mo ago
    I second the sentiment, it’s unbelievably annoying. Even more so when the suggested solution from the “support” appears to be “You can downgrade to a version before we introduced this bug”. I’m not even gonna try switching to that new crapware, I’m just going to change client altogether.
    • tacker2000 4mo ago
      Thanks for the tip, instead of enduring any longer, i decided to downgrade, which was easier than I expected, and this old version works, doesn't have this bug. Just delete the Outlook app from the Applications folder, and run the Outlook installer from version 16.109.3 (June 02, 2026) [1]. All data is there, no need for any backups or anything. Then, delete (or rename) the Microsoft AutoUpdate App, which lives in: /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0 [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-histo...
• smhenderson 4mo ago
  That one feature may be fast but anyone who ever used Outlook with multiple shared mailboxes, mailboxes over a few years old, archiving to PST files, etc. will know that Outlook Classic could hardly have ever been considered fast. Although I don't love it and avoided it for many years I've noticed a lot of these issues went away with the new Outlook. I can load and unload shared mailboxes on demand and I stopped worrying about cache mode settings about five minutes after I switched to it. It's not great, it's not terrible, like most software I use. But I would have always said the same about Outlook Classic. Bottom line for me is that MS has Classic on maintenance mode and it's only a matter of time before it's gone.
• varispeed 4mo ago
  Outlook is probably the worst software I encountered. I have seen relative being reduced to tears because she was not able to find her important emails and genuinely thought they were gone only to find out Outlook search is so crap it wouldn't find them despite getting literal sentences that were in those emails. I also particularly like merging unrelated email threads into one so you end up not following what the threads are about. The focused view is the best. It hides the emails you actually care about from you. Software like this should be illegal to distribute.
• al_borland 4mo ago
  Why can't we see the taskbar in the classic notification video? In the new version it's launching the app cold. We can't see if that's happening in the classic video or not. It seems like it's just opening a document window instead of the whole app. I don't doubt the new one is slower, but it seems odd that that's the only video that doesn't show the taskbar.
• tracker1 4mo ago
  While I don't like the new Outlook much, half the time I use it is through a browser on my Linux box anyway, when I check work email from my own hardware... I'm also don't agree with the assertions that you cannot address performance issues in a web based application. The actual email rendering in Outlook classic is still an embedded browser engine. Now it's just doing more of the application. If anything VS Code and the underlying editor system should show that you really can create pretty responsive applications on a browser surface... no, it's not the fastest, but if you're comparing to a lot of "full" IDE applications, it's a massive improvement... Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags. There's plenty of room for improvement in these applications... I think the web shift is more to support cross platform better than it is to avoid optimization. At this point, they really want to be able to support Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and maybe unofficially Linux. The browser is the best bet to make that happen. I think that wasm can bridge a lot of the performance issues where service interactions go beyond the immediate state. With the rust ecosystem as good as it is for wasm target usage, I'm frankly surprised more of the logic isn't already there instead of JS. That said, I don't know how much is effectively asm.js or electronic translations to JS, or relying on server functionality. I haven't dug that deep. That said, there's plenty of room to optimize web based applications. Even if it comes down to single-channel RDP application shells to a server-running application remotely. I think the point is to share as much as possible and support as broad an audience as they can. I think this is still happening in a context where three are still those that are trying to keep Windows on top and ignore Linux, while others in the org want to fully embrace it.
• abustamam 4mo ago
  They should just ask Copilot to convert it into a native app /s But in all seriousness, if MS really did believe in copilot, there would be no need to write webapp slop. They could just write native app slop.
• mikeaskew4 4mo ago
  Teams Classic is better too.
• Danox 4mo ago
  Copilot is now helping you out :)
• tiew9Vii 4mo ago
  I start Outlook every morning to check work emails. Sometimes it opens, sometimes it doesn’t, nothing shown on the screen, no loading dialogs, it’s as if you never opened it. Then five minutes later it opens. Happens on Windows/Mac It seems to do an update check before rendering any UI, if there’s an update it must download and apply it before showing the UI. To a user trying to open the app, it’s as if it’s broken not loading. It’s a massive pain, trying to access email but need to wait five minutes as the app decides it’s not going to open and update instead of giving the option not to, or doing it transparently in the background so app useable and prompting to restart when ready Trying to save files in office is just as frustrating. Some dark UX going on making it difficult to save locally instead of in one drive.
• larodi 4mo ago
  Microsoft Classic has COM+. It can be automated. U can automate it via POSH or whatever u like. It is super solid piece of software. Bloated or not is a very wrong move to take automation away from ppl.
• Khaine 4mo ago
  Teams, the new outlook are both piles of garbage. They've been garbage for years, and will probably still be garbage in a decade from now. Teams takes 2gig of memory on launch, and still misses keystrokes because it is so unresponsive. Click on someone and start typing and half your chat isn't recorded. Absolute hot garbage. Outlook isn't much better. People who worked on them should be ashamed to consider these products shippable.
• h4kunamata 4mo ago
  Up to middle 2000s, softwares were required to be installed either via downloading an EXE or CDROM. Nowadays everything is cloude based including e-mails, you have zero reasons to use Windows as an end user. Adobe is RIP and the alternative supports Linux, gaming is no longer excuse and in fact, games anti-cheat require kernel level access on Windows, that will never happen on Linux. Companies still use Windows because they can track everything, Microsoft Teams is more than just a chat, it tracks your status, keyboard usage, interaction with teams, camera on/off during meeting, mic, etc. Companies can build a whole profile from your Teams data. Windows is the most unsecure OS, it has always been, so companies can spend millions or billions of dollars on tools and services to make Windows somewhat usable. Also, forcing engineers to use Windows to manage Linux servers has to be the most nonsense thing ever. Make that makes sense.
• eboy 4mo ago
  [dead]
• thepra 4mo ago
  There's also an unresolved bug when a certain email is both coming from an on-prem exchange and at the same time is used as a registered account at Microsoft, outlook seems to have continuous disconnections and prompts to login into the Microsoft account in outlook rather than sticking to the already logged in exchange email. Frustrating to say the least.
• frollogaston 4mo ago
  Gave up on the fluffy article 8 paragraphs in, is the tldr the new one is web and slow? Cause that doesn't explain 10 seconds.
• xtiansimon 4mo ago
  > “Microsoft listed 15 productivity features [including] richer Copilot integration…” Dumb-@$$ Copilot in Outlook. The other day I needed to list all of the file attachments for a particular email. Copilot couldn’t do it. But it could suss my impatience.
• faragon 4mo ago
  They may consider rewriting their web-based apps into native apps using IA.
• Friedduck 4mo ago
  Outlook has been an embarrassment for years. Poor defaults, bugs that have existed for years, and sub-par performance. Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first. Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can. Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want. The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.
• dormento 4mo ago
  This is so incredibly sad. One of these years, Windows might become production-ready again.
• ulfw 4mo ago
  I don't get Microsoft (and in some ways Apple and Google). Huge companies with humongous amount of engineers. Many very capable people. They can't find 5 to build a native app for a platform used by a billion people? Like really now? Why the f is this a web app? What's the point of an OS then?
• almarcher 4mo ago
  I have 5 computers at home, running Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. I've been using PC's regularly since the 286 age, and Windows 11 is terrible, I don't want to logon to your online services in any shape or form. The windows operating system does more to disrupt my work flow than it does to assist it, the WSL layer so you can do any development helps, but I'm only using Windows at this point for games, and even then I barely play them so I'm mostly running Windows on one of my systems because it is already installed. If apple / linux up the game support I would most likely never use Windows again.
• eignerchris_ 4mo ago
  I might be an email simpleton, but I don't think I've ever used a native email application on a desktop/laptop machine ever in my 20+ years on the web. I always just used the website, starting with EarthLink, then Hotmail, then Gmail, and now Proton. What email power feature are folks using that necessitates using Outlook natively?
• shermozle 4mo ago
  If you're this far in and still using Windows and Outlook, there's no saving you. You've been in an abusive relationship for _decades_ now. Get help.
• casey2 4mo ago
  That 10 seconds of enfourced mindfullness will save your bacon when you no longer have to deal with ransomware
• ncr100 4mo ago
  This is our fault, folks. We technologists lobby ineffectively. We don't unionize. We are never not distracted.