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

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

#241

What 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?

Turns out the browser is an incredibly sophisticated and highly performant layout engine that works on almost every platform out there. Native UI frameworks are always going to be more efficient and let you access more of the hardware, but it's more expensive to maintain 2 or 3 separate codebases.

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calculator in Windows 11 still takes several seconds to load for me.

Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.

You shouldn't need to cache a calculator app to make it load quickly - it opened instantly on a machine running Windows 3.0 with 2MB RAM.

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

#243

What 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?

The least cynical argument is internationalization. Rendering engines already implement robust text layout when multiple languages are involved, so it makes sense to leverage it. The more cynical argument is that it's easier to find web designers than desktop UI designers. The more-cynical-still argument is the one you said.

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010. Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?

I wouldn't trust an "Excel guy" who said that, they aren't staying current/using new functionality. Just off the top of my head: IFNA, FORMULATEXT, DAYS, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, XLOOKUP/XMATCH, FILTER, UNIQUE, LET, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER, LAMBDA, et al. But my favorite improvement is the "don't intentionally corrupt CSVs" options found in Settings -> Data -> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything). Only took…

I gave up on Excel for working with CSV years ago, but it sounds like I need to go back and try again. It used to drive me crazy how the import function was all "just fuck my shit up, Fam" every time.

Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.

How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?

If it's the same as on Win10 it's a UWP App that needs a ton of dependencies like .net, WinUI2/XAML.

The appx is: Approximate size 21.8 MB according to https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5

Win7 calc.exe had 758KB for i686 and 897KB for amd64.

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

#246

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,…

>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.

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

#247
Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do real work on, and they resolved that enough for the market.

I wish someone would give them the performance religion. The saying that what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away is pretty old, but I will defend Microsoft in the past with the observation that, you know, 32MB of RAM to 64MB is a pretty small change in the modern sense. It doesn't take very many bitmaps or fonts or colors to burn through that sort of increase in power, even at the older resolutions of the past. There's a reason we don't all build our UIs to run on 386-class machines.

But it's gotten freaking absurd. I've got a 8-core monster that cranks up to near 5GHz at the drop of a hat, more RAM than I could have dreamed of in the 1990s, and a disk with numbers that I would have asked if you were accidentally talking about RAM back then (NVME SSDs still have ~500-1000x the latency, but the modern SSD wins handily on bandwidth). Modern code has more to do, more fonts, more graphics, more Unicode, but still it has gotten really absurd. 10 seconds on a modern computer is a lot of time. 12,000 frames of a AAA game ought to be enough computational power to check my email, not to have my email checker still choking and stuttering as it barely manages to start up.

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

#248
post #25
post #5

Started a new job, with Windows 11. notepad.exe now takes 3 to 4 seconds to load on my work system... (even after closing the last tab and reopening the program). Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...

As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable. The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.

[dead]

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file. Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as…

so true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically

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

#250

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,…

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

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