6 ms·
> 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 C
by 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 agoThe 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 agoYou 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 agoThat'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 agoWeb 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.
- sgt 4mo agoGenerally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cogman10 4mo agoFunnily, I'd say the reason web apps tend to be worse than native apps is because the web is so much more powerful and flexible. For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20. Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.
- sgt 4mo agoAlthough technically speaking, native is much more flexible as you can literally do anything. But yes, most devs will just use standard UI components and that's it. So your point holds.
- cogman10 4mo agoWell, to do literally anything outside of standard components, you effectively end up in a realm of programmatically drawing your own "anythings". Certainly possible because obviously browsers are examples of this. But a lot harder.
- rho138 4mo agoThe downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone? Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
- eyeris 4mo agoThe teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and potentially suggests muting
- rho138 4mo agoOr just… mute the audio
- eyeris 4mo agoThe Teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.
- robertlagrant 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. Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.
- stephenhuey 4mo agoYes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.
- notwhereyouare 4mo agoit really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day
- zchrykng 4mo agoGot an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.
- Barbing 4mo agoWhy does it seem to take so long to get & read one new email? I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac). Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.
- zchrykng 4mo agoMail.app's search is completely and utterly broken in my experience on Macs and on iPhones.
- rstupek 4mo agoIt looks like Apple is addressing this with the next release of macOS/iOS
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoOh yeah. For search I open the browser, usually. But 99% of the time it works without taking a European Commission session to load.
- Jakob 4mo agoI really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail. Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.
- nicoburns 4mo agoMy main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.
- jonpurdy 4mo agoI literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline. But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.
- nmjenkins 4mo ago(I work for Fastmail). That sounds odd – have you contacted our support team so we can look into it? https://www.fastmail.com/support/ https://www.fastmail.com/support/
- jonpurdy 4mo agoI didn't, but I'll do so now. I usually don't bother with support, because I forget that good companies like Fastmail actually have a competent support team.
- SCdF 4mo agoNot OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.
- everfrustrated 4mo agoThe mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.
- LopovJack 4mo ago
- codeduck 4mo agoIt would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
- archildress 4mo agoSure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
- delusional 4mo agoIt is. Classic outlook didn't intermingle ads into your inbox. That feature alone makes new outlook much better. Written on my windows phone 7 series 7 - Satya Nadella
- stackskipton 4mo agoDepending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoI do get ads. I constantly get notified about copilot features and whether I've used them 'enough'. This is done by my employer but the "adoption" team at Microsoft provide the tools to do this monitoring and advertising, and they even provide the emails they send me verbatim. I have some stuff to do with the organisation around that. God I hate those guys, they are trained to be literal shills, corporate puppies. Completely brainwashed.
- sznio 4mo agoI think it really could. You can vibe-code efficient software, if you care. Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
- soco 4mo agoThe "new" Outlook is older than Copilot, so we can't blame the AI here. Don't take this as defense of the new Outlook - I hate it with the same passion.
- thinkingtoilet 4mo agoIt's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
- herbst 4mo agoWhen was the last time they did? Buying existing companies does not count
- hylaride 4mo agoActive Directory and MS SQL Server are both solid products, as is .NET. The windows NT kernel is very well thought out, too. The last iteration of windows phone was quite good, if too little too late. Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoSQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention. Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure. .NET is a copy of Java NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
- vladvasiliu 4mo agoIME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client. Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me. I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!
- mystifyingpoi 4mo agoSame experience here. Web version works just fine.
- Jcampuzano2 4mo agoSame experience when I worked somewhere using outlook. I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.
- number6 4mo agoEven their Office Suite runs okay in the Web. For heavy lifting, like getting an md file into our Corporate Design, I still use libreoffice combned with our template.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc. What more do you need out of email? Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins. Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
- HumblyTossed 4mo agoYeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.
- someguyiguess 4mo agoNo we still do that in web dev. This one was just a classic example of design by committee. Classic microslop
- ericcholis 4mo agoI think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.
- Twirrim 4mo agoGmail used to offer a low bandwidth / performance webmail interface, that was essentially their original UI. Ran like greased lightning, used barely any memory. Emails loaded almost instantly. It was nice while it lasted.
- nasretdinov 4mo agoIsn't it still the case then? I used the basic HTML version when I was working at Google to try to understand whether or not it was slow because of the (unoptimal) frontend or not (it was the backend that sometimes took >=600ms to load messages unfortunately, not the frontend).
- hn92726819 4mo agoGoogle killed basic HTML in Gmail a few years ago
- bob1029 4mo agoWebView2 can be a fantastic experience when the application is designed around it with intent. It can't be a technological afterthought. Taking an application that was designed for web and throwing it in a desktop shell is how you wind up with bad experiences. A hybrid of WebView2 and native elements seems to be the best approach. You can completely hide the browser startup delay with these techniques. The Discord engineers decided to just throw a splash screen in front and call it a day. You could do that too. It seems to fly.
- gigel82 4mo agoUntil you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.
- canucker2016 4mo agoMicrosoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app. Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release. from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_schedule_alternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_... I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ... I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20. 7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.
- throw10920 4mo ago
- efsavage 4mo agoJust last week I vibed an .eml viewer that uses WebView2 and can confirm that it's very quick when not encrusted with garbage. https://github.com/efsavage/WinEML https://github.com/efsavage/WinEML Also a daily Fastmail user and it's as fast as any local mail client I've ever used.
- reactordev 4mo agoNot to mention they puts ads in your email client regardless of whether you use office or not
- ahartmetz 4mo agoThe decision to use web technology and the decision to not give a shit about performance (or usability for that matter, unstyled text as buttons anyone?) are often made together, even though they are theoretically independent.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoWondering to what extent the new code has been AI-assisted.
- MBCook 4mo agoMy company recently switched from Google Suite to Office 365. Both are web apps. It’s NIGHT AND DAY. Google did everything instantly. Outlook doesn’t. This morning Outlook decided to spin for 30+ seconds (at which point I gave up) showing a folder. I get a modal pop-up telling me I have to “refresh” teams multiple times a day. Search always fails the first time. Always. Then it works. Some. I agree. It’s not web tech. It’s MS not caring.
- Lammy 4mo agoThe problem with web apps isn't that they're slow but that they enable the Room 641As of the world to spy on you, just by virtue of making network connections. Encryption doesn't even matter. Just behavior patterns are enough.
- SomeUserName432 4mo agoI maintain a program using WebView2, it runs quite nicely. It needs to render custom content, and the HTML renderer is much faster than I'm able to make it myself using the native API.