As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”
I remember them being dog slow. People used to joke about loading bars going backwards. But Windows did peak with 7.
Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
441–450 of 535 posts
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#442What 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?
Some of it is anti-piracy, and it's also cheaper to support
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#443They 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…
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…
> Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
Sure. But if Zetetic, the SQLCipher[0] guys, can maintain native independent releases of Codebook [1] on all platforms there’s no excuse.
Big tech serves the shareholders. Building native applications across platforms is hard, but not “put man on the moon” hard.
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Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#444powered by AI
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is more to do with people don't want to pay for software anymore. How would a new email entrant make money when no one will pay for it?
The same question can be asked in this case: if there's no money in it, why did Microsoft pay for the creation of a new Outlook that's apparently worse than the old Outlook?
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#446The latest version of "Legacy Outlook" on Mac has a huge bug now: "Replying to or forwarding an email does not include the original message in the email body in legacy Outlook for Mac" [1] So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ?…
I second the sentiment, it’s unbelievably annoying. Even more so when the suggested solution from the “support” appears to be “You can downgrade to a version before we introduced this bug”. I’m not even gonna try switching to that new crapware, I’m just going to change client altogether.
Thanks for the tip, instead of enduring any longer, i decided to downgrade, which was easier than I expected, and this old version works, doesn't have this bug.
Just delete the Outlook app from the Applications folder, and run the Outlook installer from version 16.109.3 (June 02, 2026) [1]. All data is there, no need for any backups or anything.
Then, delete (or rename) the Microsoft AutoUpdate App, which lives in: /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-histo...
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#447Earlier 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…
That is terribly hobbled. Examples: 1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook. 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline. I am in many groups and sometimes just want to clean up my calendar without sending declines. Again, very much present in the nat…
> 1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
I'm not sure what you mean. I have rules running regularly to move messages around, delete messages older than X in some folders. It all runs fine. Maybe there are some other kinds of rules I'm not aware of? But I do remember that back when "old outlook" was still the main thing, I needed to be running for the rules to apply, which meant that interacting with a different client was always... funny.
> 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline
Could this be a config flag somewhere? I've just run a test and invited my MS account from a personal mailbox. On the event, once accepted, there are two separate actions: decline and delete. I've received the "accepted" mail, but haven't received anything after "deleting" the event.
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#448And 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.
Personally that's why I think 'async' in most languages is a farce - it could've never occured to 90s programmers, as back then applications frequently swapped out parts of their program code and state onto the disk - and there's no 'async' to save you from that.
Nowadays disks are fast, but a lot of apps are heavy - your Electron-based webapp is hundreds of megs of binary - there's no saving you from having to load that the same way. In fact most likely your app will have less assets to load than the sum of binaries.
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#449At 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.
Both can be true at the same time. You don’t have to be extremely passionate about your job and go above and beyond, you just have to be competent.
Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
#450Up 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 side…
Have you tried a Mac? Apple silicon is fantastic, build quality is the best on the market, you're still running a unix OS, and there's a huge community of developers + companies making things work.
Macs are on their way to enshittification, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
Also, see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959