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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 can't think of anything useful they added but as usual lots they ruined
The threaded message indicator UI was brilliant. Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZOXHG6NDw (note: it's not based on subject line but standard headers, I think in-reply-to)
Large orange dots represent top-level messages in the thread (the ones no one has replied to yet). The small orange dot is the message to which the current message is a reply. Grey dots represent earlier messages in this particular branch of the conversation
Watching that video also reminded me there was a pane that could show all other messages and activity for that person. Sigh.
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).
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.
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
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).
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!
> 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!
Same experience here. Web version works just fine.
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
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
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.
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.
Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
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 hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
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.
Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exe
Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
It's Copilot all the way down.
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.
This matches my experience as well. I see no lack of work to be done without necessitating additional features.
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
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.
> They have enough employees to build native apps
They'd screw those up as well.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Is anybody still using email in 2026?
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
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.
You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
I would say peak Outlook was 2010 too
I can't think of anything useful they added but as usual lots they ruined
The threaded message indicator UI was brilliant. Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZOXHG6NDw (note: it's not based on subject line but standard headers, I think in-reply-to)
Screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KyZOXHG6NDw/hqdefault.jpg
Large orange dots represent top-level messages in the thread (the ones no one has replied to yet). The small orange dot is the message to which the current message is a reply. Grey dots represent earlier messages in this particular branch of the conversation
Watching that video also reminded me there was a pane that could show all other messages and activity for that person. Sigh.
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).
> 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.
Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
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.)
Web apps are a scourge.
Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?
Yes, that’s effectively new outlook in an electron(-like?) container.
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.
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.
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.
Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
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.
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.
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.
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
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
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).
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.
Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
> 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!
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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