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

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

#171

Post by m132 »

ryandvm wrote: post #144
reaperducer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hub…

> 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...

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

#172

Post by cogman10 »

sgt wrote: post #82
zaphar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#173

Post by dspillett »

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]

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

#174

Post by Eric_WVGG »

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?

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

#175

Post by aorth »

reaperducer wrote: post #69
m132 wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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

#176

Post by cryo32 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #155
hylaride wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NT, SQL, AD is good. It's the schizophrenic management in the last 20 years that has messed it up.

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

#177

Post by cable_ »

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/...

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

#178

Post by maccard »

criddell wrote: post #116
maccard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

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.

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

#179

Post by sreekanth850 »

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.
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