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The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

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Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#111

Post by danzk »

happymellon wrote: post #79
gochi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know from anyone at the Office/Outlook team why they went with what they did, and if they had any awareness of MAUI happening at all. Fully agree with the noted benefits, so any non-MAUI team insight would be really interesting

Has the Office team ever paid that much attention to what Windows was actually recommending? All the releases that I can think of shunned the standard UI toolkits for their own homegrown UI. Presumably to show the Windows folks that the Office team is it's own little empire.

Excel even had its own custom C compiler.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#112

Post by msh »

mrcsharp wrote: post #25

I've switched to Thunderbird after hearing about this a couple of weeks ago. I simply do not want yet another WebView/Electron-based application on my machine. They feel slow and out of place compared to native applications. Microsoft, in the past 10 years, have failed to provide a good UI option for developers. WinForms is legacy. WPF is legacy. WinRT is dead. UWP is dead. MAUI is a mess. WinUI looks to be either ab…

Oh how i loved winforms back in the day. IMHO the best desktop toolkit there ever was.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#113

Post by pohuing »

tmikaeld wrote: post #30
mrcsharp wrote: post #25

I've switched to Thunderbird after hearing about this a couple of weeks ago. I simply do not want yet another WebView/Electron-based application on my machine. They feel slow and out of place compared to native applications. Microsoft, in the past 10 years, have failed to provide a good UI option for developers. WinForms is legacy. WPF is legacy. WinRT is dead. UWP is dead. MAUI is a mess. WinUI looks to be either ab…

The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant, especially when browsing thousands of e-mails in lists and sorting through them. I'd never be able to go back to scrolling with "skeleton rows" that's the web default because it can't render fast enough..

Provided thunderbird is finished fetching mails. Why that is happening on the ui thread is beyond me, but thunderbird is always frozen for a couple dozens seconds after opening it after a bunch of new mail came in.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#114

Post by selfmodruntime »

wpm wrote: post #106
wvenable wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web browser is a native cross-platform GUI framework that works everywhere -- including on the web. It's the best and most used cross-platform GUI framework that has ever existed. Why should Microsoft roll their own solution? Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser.

>It's the best and most used cross-platform GUI framework that has ever existed. Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good . It's just the least bad. >Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser. Sure would be nice if everyone would give up then and we could go back to having nice, native apps using native controls, file operations, encoding, hardware access,…

> Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good. It's just the least bad.

The web browser features a set of technologies that are standardized across a wide array of different implementations. Except for a few minor differences, you can view a website in Safari, Chrome, FireFox, Edge, Brave, the list goes on.

It's a technological wonder. I'm still amazed people hate on it.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#115

Post by wvenable »

wpm wrote: post #106
wvenable wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web browser is a native cross-platform GUI framework that works everywhere -- including on the web. It's the best and most used cross-platform GUI framework that has ever existed. Why should Microsoft roll their own solution? Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser.

>It's the best and most used cross-platform GUI framework that has ever existed. Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good . It's just the least bad. >Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser. Sure would be nice if everyone would give up then and we could go back to having nice, native apps using native controls, file operations, encoding, hardware access,…

We are absolutely reinventing the wheel on the browser but in the end up we have single broadly compatible platform across devices both small and large, with multiple implementations, and mostly all open source. It runs completely untrusted sandboxed applications. The browser is the ultimate OS for anything that doesn't require raw performance or deep integration.

People have been trying to make that since the dawn of computers. But designing something like that top-down has proven virtually impossible to get right. Building it bottom-up like we have with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and now even WASM ensures that what gets built is actually secure and practical. It might not be pretty but it works.

Even performance, which is the number one criticism of electron apps, is something that can be solved. When you Microsoft looking at making the webview a common reuable component again, what is native between something like WPF/XAML and DOM/HTML is merely a matter of perspective.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#116

Post by Affric »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #114
wpm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's the best and most used cross-platform GUI framework that has ever existed. Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good . It's just the least bad. >Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser. Sure would be nice if everyone would give up then and we could go back to having nice, native apps using native controls, file operations, encoding, hardware access,…

> Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good. It's just the least bad. The web browser features a set of technologies that are standardized across a wide array of different implementations. Except for a few minor differences, you can view a website in Safari, Chrome, FireFox, Edge, Brave, the list goes on. It's a technological wonder. I'm still amazed people hate on it.

There are three implementations you’ve listed for actual rendering: WebKit, Blink, Gecko. And it’s unlikely we will ever see another due to how complicated they are to build. It’s been becoming less diverse for almost two decades now.

And you’ve ignored the fact that every web view we have had on desktop so far is kinda crappy and sluggish when at least well built native apps generally feel snappy.

Webviews are one step about shitty Java apps (you know the ones) in terms of UI.

Beyond that there’s the RAM usage.

Be no longer amazed that people can have these problems which no web app they have used has overcome on three or four different computing platforms.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#117

Post by V__ »

SyneRyder wrote: post #49
mrcsharp wrote: post #25

I've switched to Thunderbird after hearing about this a couple of weeks ago. I simply do not want yet another WebView/Electron-based application on my machine. They feel slow and out of place compared to native applications. Microsoft, in the past 10 years, have failed to provide a good UI option for developers. WinForms is legacy. WPF is legacy. WinRT is dead. UWP is dead. MAUI is a mess. WinUI looks to be either ab…

Thunderbird is good, but I'll also suggest Postbox for people looking for alternatives. It's a commercial fork of Thunderbird (so about as "native" as Thunderbird is), but I find Postbox has a nicer UI, and at the time I switched its local email search was significantly faster. Layout is customizable, you're not restricted to the design (or theme) in their screenshots: https://www.postbox-inc.com/ It has some support…

I'm also a Postbox user and quite happy so far but I don't know if I would recommend it. Development seems to have stopped and Thunderbird is making good progress on the redesign.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#118

Post by klodolph »

rektide wrote: post #47
klodolph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is reasonably fast but it’s somewhat an exception in the world of slow Electron apps. I’ve seen performance issues with Slack and Discord. Spotify isn’t Electron, it’s CEF, but it has the same problems. The parts of Apple’s Music app which run inside the web view are noticeably worse than the other parts.

These two apps seem to be the number one and two most popular desktop-packaged webapps & they have done immeasurable damage to the perception of the web as a technology. It's cemented the perception of web desktop tech in many people's mind & I question whether it's possible to de-infect what has become a quite strongly held dogmatism. There's few apps broadly actually uses these days, so the opportunity is also trou…

Framing it as “dogmatism” is unfair.

Most people just try to see what the various tradeoffs are between alternatives. For desktop apps, we’re talking about Electron versus, say, Qt, Cocoa, WPF, or whatever.

The observation that web packaged apps are typically slower and typically have worse UIs is probably not being contested here. Likewise, the advantages of Electron for cutting costs and shipping apps faster is probably not being contested.

I think the only real question people have is, “Do you care?”

I used the desktop version of Discord for a few years. It seems like—well, a real piece of shit, to be honest. So I use the web client now. Performance is only really a problem when you scroll around, deep in the history of a channel. My point of reference is apps like Adium.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#119

Post by chaostheory »

gr33nq wrote: post #27

We had a few users try it out before we had a chance to block it using Group Policy. It was an abysmal experience for those who opted-in, and I can't imagine it ever replacing the native client without massive backlash in its current state. It clearly caters to a subset of basic users who only send/receive individually. Shared calendars, shared mailboxes, rule management, plugins, etc. were all absent and are feature…

It’ll be fine. It’s a lot more stable than native outlook. Native outlook has a ton of sync issues to name one of many problems with it
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