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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

#121

Post by kjellsbells »

PTOB wrote: post #66

Business user here. I remember how much work I could get done in Outlook 2007 using a 1024x768 monitor on a crap workstation with 1GB RAM. I admit that this performance was often chilled by the many pitfalls of on-premise Exchange setups, lack of interop with non-Exchange services, and lack of standards-compatible email formats. Today's Outlook is less buggy, but slower. This new version gives me the chills. I can un…

Amen. Another feature I miss: offline working. Classic outlook lets you explicitly disconnect in the app, work on things, and then sync later. It also lets you download only headers on a slow connection. If you spend any time working on a plane, you know what a godsend that is.

Generally I worry about the creeping consumerization of Office apps and what it means for power users. We're still out here, and we need power tools that work for us. Have the big space eye candy if you like, but please give us the option to turn the bling off and get down to work!

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#122

Post by senectus1 »

I just turned this off for our 10k fleet yesterday. (via reghack script and GPP)

utterly ludicrous that MS would make this available to everyone and not offer an official way to turn it off for a couple of months AFTER the release to public.

So sick of MS pulling this stunt.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#123

Post by senectus1 »

optimus_slime wrote: post #43
odux wrote: post #23

That article should be one line long: The new Desktop outlook is a bad idea because it supports only Office 365 and not on-prem exchange. (Which itself is a speculative claim with no substantiation except one anecdote)

Couldn't have agreed more. What a waste of 5 minutes.

the lack of feature parity and the real showstopper is NO OFFLINE SUPPORT, are also good points for why its a bad idea.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#124

Post by kjellsbells »

tracker1 wrote: post #88
jupp0r wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode is an Electron app and is great and more responsive than its "native" competitor apps from JetBrains.

In fairness, the core of VS Code is really well-crafted highly performant code. It was designed to be fast and to work for a web integrated code editor from the start. After trying Atom and Brackets, I almost didn't touch VS Code when it came out, I'm glad I did decide to try it as I really do like it. Of course most Electron apps don't have near the same level of effort or foresight when it comes to performance. Dis…

> the core of VS Code is really well-crafted highly performant code. It was designed to be fast and to work for a web integrated code editor from the start.

Seems to me this is kinda the core of the matter. VSCode written by developers, for developers, working in the domain of...development. It's almost a labor of love at that point.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#125

Post by D13Fd »

jupp0r wrote: post #14
hulitu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All Microsoft needed to do is look to the Apple Music app to know how bad an idea building it on WebView is. Teams.

Teams is just a horrible product overall. It wouldn't be better with a completely native app.

I really don't get the Teams hate. Or lure organization uses Teams every day to great effect. None of its competitors have apps worth equivalent functionality at a similar price point.

It absolutely has bugs and issues, but what it does and what it costs seem to easily outweigh those.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#127

Post by flangola7 »

wvenable wrote: post #91
LorenDB wrote: post #2

The main problem is that Microsoft is trying to use a WebView. If they really want a single cross-platform app, they should develop a native framework that will work everywhere instead of shoving everything into a web engine.

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.

>Why should Microsoft roll their own solution?

Because they're fucking Microsoft. Mutilated websites posing as apps are for hobby projects. They're in charge of the vast majority of desktop operating system interaction, if my pitiful 17 dev company can write all-native programs, so can they.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#128

Post by ksec »

codethief wrote: post #99
tmikaeld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

> The native views of thunderbird are wonderfully performant Are we using the same Thunderbird? For me it feels rather sluggish.

99% of HN suggest VSCode is very fast, when Sublime exist.

It is one reason why the other day we have a submission "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened"

Most people aren't latency sensitive. Or do not care about it enough. The world of computing has then settle of sluggish behaviour being the norm. As most are OK with it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#129

Post by naikrovek »

JohnFen wrote: post #54
AJ007 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook's UI design by itself really is terrible. I don't know how so many people accept using it. I have a single business account I used Outlook for, switched to Thunderbird, and it is vastly less painful to use. I can find, read, and sort emails at least 3x quicker than with Outlook. Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was…

> I don't know how so many people accept using it. Everyone I know who uses it only does so because their employers require them to.

I've been using Outlook for .. wow over 25 years now.

Early on it was an unstable crashy mess, but in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it.

I am ... not happy that the full client is slated to go away at some point in the future. I know Outlook well; I know how to wield it effectively and to make it behave in the way I want it to.

I have a Macbook and a Windows desktop PC at work. Outlook on the Mac is a tire fire, and it is the new WebView2 version. Horrendous. For the moment, I can get something like the full Windows Outlook application via Outlook for the Web, which is saying a lot, because it itself is an extremely watered-down version of the full Outlook email client on Windows.

Microsoft has been doing this a lot lately, and it's starting to make me a bit angry. They replace good stuff that they don't want to work on anymore with some web-enabled version or a version built on web technologies, which itself is a bad idea, even if the replacements were feature-complete compared to what they're replacing, but they're not. They're partial skeletons in comparison to what they're replacing. Toys. ALL of the advanced features that I have come to rely on in Outlook in the past 25 years are simply not present in Outlook for Mac.

It's a bad trend and I don't see it stopping. In another decade, the apps we have now will be replaced with something else once someone at Microsoft once again gets it inside their head that it'll be better to rewrite rather than to adopt the existing code, and that version will be even slimmer and more useless than what's coming out today.

We are choosing to make things worse every day and I do not understand it. I'm not saying that Outlook is a shining example of a good application, or that it is even in the top 10 email clients, I'm saying that I'm used to it and that I like it. It has continuously improved for 25 years and now it's slated to be replaced with a fucking webapp that's running locally.

What in the world are people smoking thinking that ease of development is paramount to performance for applications which are very interaction-heavy? Typing text into Outlook for Mac on an M1 with 32GB of RAM is not instantaneous. FOR AN EMAIL APPLICATION. Unacceptable, but this is the route they're choosing because development is easier...

I will never understand how web tech got so bad, and even if I do wind up understanding that, I will definitely not ever understand why people choose to use web technologies over things which have worked and have continually improved for decades.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#130

Post by xcdzvyn »

grudg3 wrote: post #105
snowwrestler wrote: post #20

At work I switched from the Outlook client app to the web version as soon as we migrated our email from on-prem Exchange to MS365 (cloud hosted). Specifically, I get my email at outlook.office.com. Works great in Safari and Chrome on Mac. Searching old emails is way faster and easier in the web version. It takes up no space on my machine, and there are not thousands of potentially sensitive emails sitting on the hard…

> Searching old emails is way faster and easier in the web version. It takes up no space on my machine, and there are not thousands of potentially sensitive emails sitting on the hard drive of a laptop I carry around. Way better all around. Do Mac computers not encrypt their drives? Like Bitlocker on Windows? Having sensitive information on your laptop should not be a worry if your IT team does their job right.

They do, it's enabled by default I believe. macOS also wipes the private key from memory whenever the laptop is asleep, rather than keeping it around like LUKS or BitLocker.
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