Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by patates » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #202

vladvasiliu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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,…

Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.

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

#272

Post by babypuncher » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#273

Post by jerlam » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #202

vladvasiliu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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,…

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.

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

#274

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

herbst wrote: post #62

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#275

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

cryo32 wrote: post #176

SoftTalker wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft shows how long you can coast on some good decisions.

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

#276

Post by canucker2016 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

gigel82 wrote: post #203

bob1029 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

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_...

  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.

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

#277

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

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.

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

#278

Post by cik » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

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.

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

#279

Post by layer8 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

pornel wrote: post #268

layer8 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#280

Post by bigstrat2003 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

knorker wrote: post #16

> 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 m…

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.