I tried it, and it's not great. Probably OK for light home or school use, but I have work to do, and as terrible as desktop Outlook is, it's powerful and terrible.
The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
31–40 of 155 posts
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#32In 2023 it seems like no one wants to use anything other than JS and CSS to build a native desktop application. I would be interested in seeing a desktop environment that just cuts to the chase and makes the entire desktop a web view so that developers don’t need to package things into extra layers. Weren’t there a few failed mobile OSes that tried this in the early 2010s?
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#33I'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…
Vscode feels blitz fast. Which apps have you tried that feel slow?
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already have MAUI. I don't have direct professional experience with it, but the message I'm getting from those who have used it, is that it's cumbersome. With people instead just sticking with XF/Uno/Avalonia (Avalonia being closer to Flutter in how it doesn't actually tap into the platform's native frameworks).
Even if its cumbersome, it's still a win-win for them to use it. The outlook app will be native desktop and mobile (except linux for now). Plus it will give the maui project more credibility, help grow its userbase. Make the framework better by providing a real world project for the maui team to benchmark, highlighting pain point, provide in-house feedback, feature request.
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
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#35I'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…
First, I agree. Microsoft has failed to provide a viable platform for native GUI development, and IMO there is still a place for native desktop applications. Part of the reason Windows stayed so prevalent for so long is its rich software ecosystem - arguably, an ecosystem that partially resulted from MS's focus on developers.
However, there may be additional reasons for building new products with web tech. Someone already needs to maintain the web versions of these applications. If you're going to offer web access to Outlook, a team needs to be responsible for maintaining that web application. By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms.
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#36The 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.
Name a native UI framework that enables seamless cross-platform deployment without extensive testing on each platform.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#37I'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…
Vscode feels blitz fast. Which apps have you tried that feel slow?
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.
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#38The 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.
vscode is an Electron app and is great and more responsive than its "native" competitor apps from JetBrains.
JetBrains' IDEs are very heavyweight, it's apples to oranges. And while there is some native code in them, they're still driven by the JVM mostly. There is fleet, but it's not an improvement to vscode at all IMO.
How about vscode vs sublime, neovim, or any other native text editor with LSP support? vscode is slow comparatively.
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#39I'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…
First, I agree. Microsoft has failed to provide a viable platform for native GUI development, and IMO there is still a place for native desktop applications. Part of the reason Windows stayed so prevalent for so long is its rich software ecosystem - arguably, an ecosystem that partially resulted from MS's focus on developers. However, there may be additional reasons for building new products with web tech. Someone al…
> By replacing the native desktop app with a wrapper around their existing web application, Microsoft reduces the need to separately build and maintain features in both platforms.
True, but it's at the price of having an inferior product. But perhaps Microsoft doesn't care about that.
Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
#40In 2023 it seems like no one wants to use anything other than JS and CSS to build a native desktop application. I would be interested in seeing a desktop environment that just cuts to the chase and makes the entire desktop a web view so that developers don’t need to package things into extra layers. Weren’t there a few failed mobile OSes that tried this in the early 2010s?
Palm Pre's webOS (2009) is the most famous. After an acquisition by HP (2010-2013), it was acquired by LG's (with patents going to Qualcomm). The only other major entrant, Firefox, was short lived (2014-2015). Chrome OS (2011-) only sort of counts; I don't think the OS chrome is using Chrome, just the same underlying drawing libraries, but it does run webapps.
Before that was a neat Linux project Pyrodesktop (2007) which was an x11 window manager using Firefox guts to render. There was also a trend of trying to mate Javascript technologies to gnome back then, with efforts like gjs seeing some adoption. I don't know how popular it is, but a spinoff of css was/is used for styling in GNOME for a while.
These days there's tons of web desktop projects. https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops . Only sort of in the spirit but i quite adore Greenfield, an html5 Wayland desktop/compositor. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
I absolutely think there is all-in potential for the web. I think we're missing a visible rallying point, where a stronger community of app makers can cooperatively advance beyond-the-web capabilities. Project Fugu & WICG help a lot but are also working with Safari (and sort of Firefox) handcuffed to them.