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patates 2 hours 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.
vladvasiliu 49 minutes ago [-]
IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.
Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.
I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!
mystifyingpoi 39 minutes ago [-]
Same experience here. Web version works just fine.
HumblyTossed 44 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.
someguyiguess 8 minutes ago [-]
No we still do that in web dev. This one was just a classic example of design by committee. Classic microslop
olex 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
stephenhuey 3 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.
sgt 1 hours 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.
rho138 28 minutes ago [-]
The 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 2 minutes ago [-]
The 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
zaphar 47 minutes 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.
sgt 40 minutes ago [-]
Generally 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.
5 minutes ago [-]
zchrykng 21 minutes ago [-]
Got 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 18 minutes 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.
notwhereyouare 2 hours ago [-]
it 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
ericcholis 6 minutes ago [-]
I think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.
archildress 1 hours ago [-]
Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
sznio 48 minutes ago [-]
I 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.
delusional 1 hours ago [-]
It 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 49 minutes ago [-]
Depending 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.
soco 41 minutes ago [-]
The "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 55 minutes ago [-]
It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
herbst 50 minutes ago [-]
When was the last time they did? Buying existing companies does not count
hylaride 5 minutes ago [-]
Active 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.
codeduck 1 hours ago [-]
It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
m132 2 hours 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 46 minutes 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 8 minutes ago [-]
I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
exe34 4 minutes 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.
netsharc 2 hours 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...
beart 2 hours ago [-]
As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.
The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
Plasmoid2000ad 25 minutes ago [-]
Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.
ngc248 8 minutes ago [-]
True ... my company recently started deploying endpoint protection like crowdstrike, beyondtrust, zscalet onto our macs and these have slowed my machine considerably. They somehow spike the CPU just when I am doing something important.
criddell 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like something is wrong with your system.
My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.
froindt 2 minutes ago [-]
The best demonstration of the delay is typing Calc in the Win+R Run dialog. There's a difference between instant and "way faster than Word".
On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.
I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.
maccard 38 minutes ago [-]
At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
criddell 16 minutes ago [-]
I know IT people often aren't given the time to dig into this stuff, but xperf and event tracing should reveal the culprit fairly quickly.
The best resource for this kind of stuff is Bruce Dawson's blog:
Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."
itopaloglu83 2 hours 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.
Telaneo 16 minutes 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.
LollipopYakuza 55 minutes 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.
chris_wot 53 minutes ago [-]
That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
lelandfe 44 minutes ago [-]
The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
chris_wot 31 minutes ago [-]
iOS and macOS aren't even close to the awfulness of search on Windows.
nzoschke 1 hours 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.
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 55 minutes 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 26 minutes ago [-]
I hate this type of disguised ad paired with a running commentary on important issues.
shevy-java 22 minutes ago [-]
At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.
someguyiguess 3 minutes ago [-]
Yes. That point in time was long before AI. Remember Longhorn/Vista? Windows ME? Etc, etc…
BLKNSLVR 52 minutes 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.
projektfu 5 minutes 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 2 minutes ago [-]
The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.
SV_BubbleTime 19 minutes 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.
nticompass 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
Sesse__ 41 minutes ago [-]
It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
aboardRat4 27 minutes ago [-]
Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe
SV_BubbleTime 18 minutes ago [-]
Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
nticompass 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
It's Copilot all the way down.
Telaneo 21 minutes 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).
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 43 minutes 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 25 minutes 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.
lbriner 23 minutes 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 12 minutes ago [-]
> They have enough employees to build native apps
They'd screw those up as well.
vjvjvjvjghv 26 minutes 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.
blueferret 17 minutes 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.
FinnKuhn 2 hours 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 21 minutes 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.
Telaneo 7 minutes 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.
FinnKuhn 16 minutes ago [-]
Apparently, they did a rework of the interface a few years ago.
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
teekert 17 minutes 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.
mawadev 28 minutes 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.
LetsGetTechnicl 5 minutes ago [-]
Web apps are a scourge.
askonomm 23 minutes 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 15 minutes 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.
bonoboTP 41 minutes 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.
fg137 2 hours 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 46 minutes 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.
complianceowll 41 minutes ago [-]
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa...
Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
exabrial 18 minutes ago [-]
Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?
Adam-Hincu 3 hours ago [-]
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
expedition32 2 minutes 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.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
MichaelZuo 2 hours ago [-]
I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010.
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
anonymars 32 minutes ago [-]
I would say peak Outlook was 2010 too
I can't think of anything useful they added but as usual lots they ruined
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1970-01-01 2 hours 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 1 hours 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.
Yossarrian22 58 minutes ago [-]
You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
airstrike 2 hours ago [-]
I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
j16sdiz 2 hours ago [-]
XLOOKUP was introduced in 2019. I thought it was a great update
Someone1234 45 minutes 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).
nhinck2 4 minutes ago [-]
> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything).
It still butchers long strings of digits if they are more than around 12 and less than around 15 digits long, its very annoying still.
Also textjoin and textsplit and the whole spill functionality.
bogometer 2 hours ago [-]
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
JumpCrisscross 23 minutes ago [-]
Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?
SV_BubbleTime 16 minutes ago [-]
Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.
Sharlin 1 hours 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 1 hours 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 59 minutes 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.)
tiahura 18 minutes 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.
DaedalusII 1 hours 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
instakill 1 hours ago [-]
new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
herbst 48 minutes 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.
Ekaros 1 hours ago [-]
Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
stackskipton 52 minutes 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.
shevy-java 23 minutes 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 13 minutes 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.
einpoklum 24 minutes ago [-]
"Old" Outlook is slow enough as well. Especially with Corporate "security" software.
2OEH8eoCRo0 44 minutes ago [-]
Decisions of a company with no competition.
SV_BubbleTime 12 minutes 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.
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.
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 43 minutes ago [-]
I think that's caused by OneDrive. Which was the "shove down your throat" flavour of a couple of generations ago.
F OneDrive.
jasonvorhe 1 hours ago [-]
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
stainablesteel 1 hours 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
knorker 2 hours 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.
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
itopaloglu83 1 hours 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 1 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.
jiggawatts 1 hours ago [-]
Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
AshamedCaptain 2 hours ago [-]
What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
SoKamil 1 hours 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 50 minutes 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.
lawlorino 26 minutes 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).
lenerdenator 1 hours ago [-]
Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
mc32 2 hours 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 1 hours 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
Written on my windows phone 7 series 7
- Satya Nadella
Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.
THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
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.
Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.
On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.
I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
The best resource for this kind of stuff is Bruce Dawson's blog:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/
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.
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.
A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
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/
The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
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.
Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.
https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4
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.
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.
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.
They'd screw those up as well.
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...
I've never had problems with Thunderbird on that front, but then again, I've never had email accounts with 100k emails archived.
https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/th... and https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbi...
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
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?
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.
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
I can't think of anything useful they added but as usual lots they ruined
The threaded message indicator UI was brilliant. Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZOXHG6NDw
Screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KyZOXHG6NDw/hqdefault.jpg
Large orange dots represent top-level messages in the thread (the ones no one has replied to yet). The small orange dot is the message to which the current message is a reply. Grey dots represent earlier messages in this particular branch of the conversation
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).
It still butchers long strings of digits if they are more than around 12 and less than around 15 digits long, its very annoying still.
Also textjoin and textsplit and the whole spill functionality.
(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
Now if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ...
To which, I bet someone does. If you think Windows nails all the right ideas, there is Mint.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
F OneDrive.
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
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.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
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.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
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.
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.
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?
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.