Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

windowslatest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 535 posts

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

#141

Post by Jakob »

zchrykng wrote: post #103
olex wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.

Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.

I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.

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

#142

Post by someguyiguess »

trinix912 wrote: post #94
sznio wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now you can use AI to create even more unnecessary features even quicker. i think that having teams for each product is an antipattern. if the team was purely a "mail task force", the workers could be placed to work on Exchange or the Azure related bullshit. But now, the Outlook team has to constantly create unnecessary work for itself.

From my experience using Outlook, they could keep the Outlook team for bugfixes only and still have enough work for the next 5 years just improving/fixing the classic version.

This matches my experience as well. I see no lack of work to be done without necessitating additional features.

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

#143

Post by perarneng »

JavaScript needs to do whatever JavaScript needs to do.

It's incredible when we have AI assistants that slow shit like that still ships in products affecting millions of users. Imagine how much totally wasted energy that costs just because the companies are cheap. Just port it to Rust and run it as webassembly at least.

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

#144

Post by ryandvm »

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…

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 hubris, I am part of the problem. 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.

Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?

Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.

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

#145

Post by kevinsync »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #99

Is anybody still using email in 2026? Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.

Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.

I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.

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

#146

Post by klop1324 »

nzoschke wrote: post #36

Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape? This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out. I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science. I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last m…

I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).

There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.

Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.

It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.

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

#147

Post by lelandfe »

Uzazo wrote: post #140
lelandfe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant. iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first

Tip: Spotlight searches through all data and can be slow, but there's a separate App Library search that only searches the app names and it's instant.

One of the first things I do on any Mac device is to disable Spotlight, install and bind Alfred to Cmd-Space, and then change Finder's preferences so that Cmd-F searches the current directory.

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

#148

Post by piker »

klop1324 wrote: post #146
nzoschke wrote: post #36

Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape? This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out. I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science. I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last m…

I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own). There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles. Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for custo…

Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.

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

#149

Post by ThinkingGuy »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #99

Is anybody still using email in 2026? Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.

IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:

- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider

- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)

Post reply on HN