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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.
>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day.
Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.
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.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
Public Folders is what makes us stick with the old Outlook client. For 25 years Public Folder has been a simple drag and drop, hierarchical archive system for communications with clients and vendors at team level.
Even 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Funnily, 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.
Although 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.
Well, 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.
> 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.
My 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.
I 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.
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.
It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
> 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.
Why 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.
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
The 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.
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.
Gmail 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.
Isn'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).
WebView2 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.
Until 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.
Microsoft 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.
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.
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.
> SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.
It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.
>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).
> .NET is a copy of Java
That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.
> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.
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I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...
I will say that in the era when they came out with AD they really took "enterprise configuration management" seriously and made Windows by far the best mainstream ecosystem to manage hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops.
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> 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. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
The solution is competition in software. But it's a really, really dysfunctional market. Outlook persists because it can speak to Exchange. Too many bad software products persist because they're part of a lock-in with something that's difficult or expensive to swap out. Ultimately, Windows itself.
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).
Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).
Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …
Easier and faster software development frameworks have made it cheaper to ship garbage software. Nobody really knows how to measure software quality, but agile development makes it very easy to measure software quantity, so that is what companies prioritize.
It's why AI-driven development isn't actually yielding better products even though it makes developers more efficient. It's just being used to pump out garbage faster.
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...
It's sad. Further compounding the problem like siblings have said is enterprise security stack stuff - EDRs/XDRs, app control, firewalls, productivity police nonsense.
The second thing is that enterprises typically don't have someone fighting for the desktop UX to remain usable when PC fleets go up for purchase - pick the cheapest toilet paper is often the strategy of the day. Now you have a PC that hits a bargain price point that seemed attractive on some analysis to the CFO, it's been saddled with security software that saps 50% of the limited performance to begin with.
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.
Yeah, I'm worried about the day when infosec turns it's eye toward WSL. So far they have turned a blind eye, but just wait until someone cooks up an exploit targeting WSL...
They don't explicitly block it in my org, but connecting to VPN while it's running breaks the networking inside WSL.
Sometimes it is routed from the VPN, sometimes it is DNS, sometimes it just needs a restart. I'm not sure if that situation has improved. There were some workarounds at one point.
True, those things make Windows unusable. They also make the Mac worse, but not so much worse that it isn’t an absolute breath of fresh air compared to any corporate provided Windows device.
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.
Yes, it's usually a filter driver that delays execution until something like a hash is checked or other rules evaluate. Some products hash every interesting/executable file on the PC. They're powerful tools but can be extremely performance-sapping.
Microsoft has AppLocker (since Win7, I think). If you give it a curated whitelist it's actually quite alright and manages well via GPO. (until you manage to lock yourself out ;)
Much less overhead than any 3rd party tool that hooks the kernel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't even start notepad.exe since upgrading to 11. It complains about a missing DLL. I'm only down to a few pieces of daily-driver software that I absolutely need a non-VM Windows installation for. Once I migrate from those, it'll be a full switch to Linux for me. I've hated Microsoft with a passion for far too long
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.
I'm not IT, I'm' just the senior most engineer in a game studio. Ive got WPA captures that point to windows defender, even with processes and folders excluded. But I have literally no idea what to do with those traces, hence my 99% conviction.
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.
in windows 11 i launch calc from win+r and it opens right when i hit enter. the delay is not from the launch dialog/OS but from the app (i use windows 7 calculator, i've replaced it because i don't like win 10+ calc design)
To everyone reading this, Win 11 Notepad CAN BE UNINSTALLED.
Old one lives in c:/windows/notepad.exe which you can open with Win+R, type notepad to open good old non-slop non-ai notpead. Or do some registry shenanigans (you can find them online) to bring that one in start menu or make it a default editor.
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.
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
One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.
I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).
There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.
Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.
It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.
Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.
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.
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.
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.
They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.
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.
Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.
I use Windows exclusively for games, but I don't like playing the game of disabling upsells, dodging unkillable Edge, and restoring secret pre-AI versions of Windows components.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
There are at least 4 platforms they would need to support: Win, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
That's 4 different software engineers at least, just for the frontend.
Then, there's various backend engineers, who could be shared, yes, but not always. Android's weird runtime requirements are bespoke enough that just because the database is written in C++, doesn't mean it's the same C++ database as what the Windows backend would use.
Finally, there's the designers, who end up consolidating all the unique things about each native platform into a common design language so they can have a shared vision on all of the platforms. So engineers end up building UI that works identically on all 4 platforms, and you're basically building a bespoke "browser" at that point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.)
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.
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
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/...
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[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]
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.
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).
I gave up on Excel for working with CSV years ago, but it sounds like I need to go back and try again. It used to drive me crazy how the import function was all "just fuck my shit up, Fam" every time.
Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
All web apps are in fact slow compared to native apps. They are also clunky (though that's my opinion, not a fact). There are better and worse web apps, yes. And it's possible to make native apps which are even worse than a web app. But "like all web apps, it's slow" is a perfectly fair statement.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
> People treat email has a permanent data store.
Is this strange?
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.
I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.
I mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time.
But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.
Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.
Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
Not even counting Sharepoint syncs...
>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
so true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically
Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.
Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.
More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.
A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..
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.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
> People treat email has a permanent data store.
Email the protocol has this built in.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
Public Folders is what makes us stick with the old Outlook client. For 25 years Public Folder has been a simple drag and drop, hierarchical archive system for communications with clients and vendors at team level.
Same 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.
Same experience here. Web version works just fine.
Even 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 suggests pre-muting your audio.
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
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.
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.
Funnily, 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.
Although 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.
Well, 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.
> 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.
Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.
My 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.
The mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
> 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.
Why 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.
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
The 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.
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.
No we still do that in web dev. This one was just a classic example of design by committee. Classic microslop
Gmail 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.
Isn'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).
Just 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
Also a daily Fastmail user and it's as fast as any local mail client I've ever used.
WebView2 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.
Until 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.
Microsoft 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_...
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.It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
When was the last time they did? Buying existing companies does not count
Windows NT/2k?
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.
SQL 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.
> SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.
It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.
>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).
> .NET is a copy of Java
That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.
> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.
---
I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...
I will say that in the era when they came out with AD they really took "enterprise configuration management" seriously and made Windows by far the best mainstream ecosystem to manage hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops.
NT, SQL, AD is good. It's the schizophrenic management in the last 20 years that has messed it up.
Microsoft shows how long you can coast on some good decisions.
Exactly that. Haven’t heard it said like that before. Same with my company.
Wondering to what extent the new code has been AI-assisted.
Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
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.
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
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
Not to mention they puts ads in your email client regardless of whether you use office or not
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.
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.
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.
> I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> 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. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...
The solution is competition in software. But it's a really, really dysfunctional market. Outlook persists because it can speak to Exchange. Too many bad software products persist because they're part of a lock-in with something that's difficult or expensive to swap out. Ultimately, Windows itself.
I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
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.
Why this enshittification…
I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).
Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).
Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …
Easier and faster software development frameworks have made it cheaper to ship garbage software. Nobody really knows how to measure software quality, but agile development makes it very easy to measure software quantity, so that is what companies prioritize.
It's why AI-driven development isn't actually yielding better products even though it makes developers more efficient. It's just being used to pump out garbage faster.
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...
It's sad. Further compounding the problem like siblings have said is enterprise security stack stuff - EDRs/XDRs, app control, firewalls, productivity police nonsense.
The second thing is that enterprises typically don't have someone fighting for the desktop UX to remain usable when PC fleets go up for purchase - pick the cheapest toilet paper is often the strategy of the day. Now you have a PC that hits a bargain price point that seemed attractive on some analysis to the CFO, it's been saddled with security software that saps 50% of the limited performance to begin with.
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.
Yeah, I'm worried about the day when infosec turns it's eye toward WSL. So far they have turned a blind eye, but just wait until someone cooks up an exploit targeting WSL...
In my experience they just block it in corporate environments.
They don't explicitly block it in my org, but connecting to VPN while it's running breaks the networking inside WSL.
Sometimes it is routed from the VPN, sometimes it is DNS, sometimes it just needs a restart. I'm not sure if that situation has improved. There were some workarounds at one point.
It's "just" a Hyper-V VM with some extra drivers to talk to the sibling VM. There isn't much special about it that should worry you too much.
Well, I'd like to tell security that
True, those things make Windows unusable. They also make the Mac worse, but not so much worse that it isn’t an absolute breath of fresh air compared to any corporate provided Windows device.
> The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
There's your mistake, if do it faster, you're going to get more work assigned. If you do it as Windows speed you get to do less work. Same money.
Yeh. The unix VNC session I connect to is snappier than the client host it is running on.
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.
Yes, it's usually a filter driver that delays execution until something like a hash is checked or other rules evaluate. Some products hash every interesting/executable file on the PC. They're powerful tools but can be extremely performance-sapping.
Microsoft has AppLocker (since Win7, I think). If you give it a curated whitelist it's actually quite alright and manages well via GPO. (until you manage to lock yourself out ;) Much less overhead than any 3rd party tool that hooks the kernel.
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.
Those are basically spyware hooked to every system call.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't even start notepad.exe since upgrading to 11. It complains about a missing DLL. I'm only down to a few pieces of daily-driver software that I absolutely need a non-VM Windows installation for. Once I migrate from those, it'll be a full switch to Linux for me. I've hated Microsoft with a passion for far too long
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.
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.
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:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/
I'm not IT, I'm' just the senior most engineer in a game studio. Ive got WPA captures that point to windows defender, even with processes and folders excluded. But I have literally no idea what to do with those traces, hence my 99% conviction.
If it's that bad, why not just disable it?
Enterprise versions are tamper-protected.
Can you not dual boot into something else and delete the executable?
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.
That one is a little slower for me too - about 700 ms (it's a difficult thing to time with a stopwatch).
The iOS app "Is it snappy?" Is great for things like this.
That's really cool and what a great idea. Thanks for the recommendation.
in windows 11 i launch calc from win+r and it opens right when i hit enter. the delay is not from the launch dialog/OS but from the app (i use windows 7 calculator, i've replaced it because i don't like win 10+ calc design)
Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."
To everyone reading this, Win 11 Notepad CAN BE UNINSTALLED.
Old one lives in c:/windows/notepad.exe which you can open with Win+R, type notepad to open good old non-slop non-ai notpead. Or do some registry shenanigans (you can find them online) to bring that one in start menu or make it a default editor.
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.
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
Tip: Spotlight searches through all data and can be slow, but there's a separate App Library search that only searches the app names and it's instant.
One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.
iOS and macOS aren't even close to the awfulness of search on Windows.
Although they have just rewritten it so there must have been some problems with it.
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/
The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).
There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.
Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.
It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.
Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.
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.
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.
I hate this type of disguised ad paired with a running commentary on important issues.
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.
Yes. That point in time was long before AI. Remember Longhorn/Vista? Windows ME? Etc, etc…
They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.
This happened ~2014/2015.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-microsoft-doe...
I use Office 97 for this reason, it's like 400mb installed and everything happens instantly. Grab a copy off archive.org!
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.
Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.
Luckily, one can still revert to the classic calculator: https://win7games.com/#calc
I use Windows exclusively for games, but I don't like playing the game of disabling upsells, dodging unkillable Edge, and restoring secret pre-AI versions of Windows components.
I don’t like it either, but as an easy solution it’s still the lesser evil for me. At least they do allow running 20-year old binaries.
Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.
The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.
It seems that some Windows computers are generally laggy with no good reason. I could recommend installing Old Calculator.
https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...
It was a little difficult setting it up so that the calculator key on the keyboard pulls it up but aside from that it works well.
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.
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?
If it's the same as on Win10 it's a UWP App that needs a ton of dependencies like .net, WinUI2/XAML.
The appx is: Approximate size 21.8 MB according to https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5
Win7 calc.exe had 758KB for i686 and 897KB for amd64.
You shouldn't need to cache a calculator app to make it load quickly - it opened instantly on a machine running Windows 3.0 with 2MB RAM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
There are at least 4 platforms they would need to support: Win, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
That's 4 different software engineers at least, just for the frontend.
Then, there's various backend engineers, who could be shared, yes, but not always. Android's weird runtime requirements are bespoke enough that just because the database is written in C++, doesn't mean it's the same C++ database as what the Windows backend would use.
Finally, there's the designers, who end up consolidating all the unique things about each native platform into a common design language so they can have a shared vision on all of the platforms. So engineers end up building UI that works identically on all 4 platforms, and you're basically building a bespoke "browser" at that point.
> They have enough employees to build native apps
They'd screw those up as well.
The platform is not the issue. Competent engineering teams could blow this out of the water with a single threaded jquery web app.
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe
.vbs
It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
Or Outlook.com, their free webmail alternative to Gmail?
Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
There are 2 that are a bunch of software. But AFAIK, they have the same Outlook inside.
It's Copilot all the way down.
Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
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.
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.
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.
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.
The will save bug-fixing as a work-reserve or future job security, and keep adding more visible/flashy new buggy/bloated features.
This matches my experience as well. I see no lack of work to be done without necessitating additional features.
As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”
I wish we had more Casey Muratoris and less Sam Altmans.
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.
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”.)
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Apparently, they did a rework of the interface a few years ago.
https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/th... and https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There are plenty of cross platform options. I write with Qt for example.
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/...
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.
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
New Outlook doesn't even have feature parity with Outlook Classic.
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.
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.
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]
Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010.
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
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.
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.
I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
XLOOKUP was introduced in 2019. I thought it was a great update
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).
I gave up on Excel for working with CSV years ago, but it sounds like I need to go back and try again. It used to drive me crazy how the import function was all "just fuck my shit up, Fam" every time.
Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
It should be based on Team's code base :-)
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
Even the damn Artemis astronauts on the way to the moon had to call home to troubleshoot Outlook
The funny thing is that the Outlook client for Mac is a native app and it's way better than the Windows client.
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.
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).
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.)
Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?
Web apps are a scourge.
Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?
Some of us use software that is windows only eg any non-software engineering discipline.
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
new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
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.
Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
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.
Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?
Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.
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 ...
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.
"Old" Outlook is slow enough as well. Especially with Corporate "security" software.
Is anybody still using email in 2026?
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
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.
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)
Do you have a job?
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.
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
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?
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.
Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
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.
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.
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.
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).
Good question. There are two versions of Outlook on macOS.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Outlook/outlook-for-mac
Which one did you use?
Decisions of a company with no competition.
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.
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.
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.
I think that's caused by OneDrive. Which was the "shove down your throat" flavour of a couple of generations ago.
F OneDrive.
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
Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
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.
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?
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.
The only thing not slowing down is the speed of enshittification at Microslop.
enshitification
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.
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!
All web apps are in fact slow compared to native apps. They are also clunky (though that's my opinion, not a fact). There are better and worse web apps, yes. And it's possible to make native apps which are even worse than a web app. But "like all web apps, it's slow" is a perfectly fair statement.
What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.
Is the new Outlook client a JS/Electron app?
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