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

The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

windowscentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#51

Post by AJ007 »

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…

If you don't like the original Thunderbird UI, try the new Thunderbird Supernova - https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/

They are updating the UI, and doing a good job https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-superno...

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#52

Post by jmaker »

Microsoft has been dismantling the desktop UX for me over the past few years. I think they’re migrating the entire UI into the browser. The Office macOS UI appears and feels substantially worse to me than its Windows counterpart. I had to migrate from Windows to macOS because I was no longer feeling comfortable on Windows. My UX with the Apple office suite is by far better. Put formally, the set difference between the features of Word and Excel and the features of Pages and Numbers is empty for my use cases. Same with PowerPoint and Keynote. Outlook used to be good, a proper PIM, it never had been excellent, but it used to be good, even a decade ago. The only thing I regret now is that I’d extended my Microsoft 365 by three years before I realized what they’re up to.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#53

Post by pc86 »

rektide wrote: post #33
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…

Vscode feels blitz fast. Which apps have you tried that feel slow?

Not compared to literally any non-Electron text editor. It's barely faster than native full IDEs.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#54

Post by JohnFen »

AJ007 wrote: post #50
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…

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.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#55

Post by sharikous »

bitwize wrote: post #36
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.

Name a native UI framework that enables seamless cross-platform deployment without extensive testing on each platform. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Tauri is quasi-native in that it uses native WebViews. It ought to be the best of both worlds once we accept that web-based UI is the only way now

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#56

Post by JohnFen »

adamrezich wrote: post #8
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.

it's one thing when third parties do this, and quite another when it's the operating system manufacturer. it's as though Microsoft doesn't want Microsoft Windows users to feel good about being Microsoft Windows users when they use their Microsoft software from within Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft appears to have stopped caring about how Windows users feel about using Windows quite a long time ago.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#57

Post by BaseballPhysics »

bitwize wrote: post #36
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.

Name a native UI framework that enables seamless cross-platform deployment without extensive testing on each platform. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Sure. Electron or similar tech are doing a very simple thing: they're externalizing development costs by transferring them to the individual users in the form of storage costs, performance costs, and user experience costs, to name a few.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is a behemoth. Your argument makes total sense for a small shop with limited bandwidth to test. Companies like Microsoft don't get that excuse. They're simply padding their bottom line at our collective expense, and they can do it because they have extremely sticky services in a lot of areas (in this case, corporate email infra).

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#58

Post by mxuribe »

KronisLV wrote: post #9
WeylandYutani wrote: post #5

I acquired Office 21 LTSC because I really hated the new design so now I'm safe for the next 5 years. Realize there are probably hundreds of UI designers working at MS who need to look busy.

> I acquired Office 21 LTSC because I really hated the new design so now I'm safe for the next 5 years. I'm personally using various free alternatives to Microsoft's offerings - Thunderbird for mail, LibreOffice for office work, something like Nextcloud for cloud file storage etc. While things aren't always great, it's still surprising to me how viable this alternative path is nowadays, especially when it feels like…

> ...While things aren't always great, it's still surprising to me how viable this alternative path is nowadays, especially when it feels like control over the software we use is getting taken away from us (for a variety of reasons)...

You said it best right there! I've also been using open source alternatives for many, many years...and have plenty of scars to prove it...but nowadays the options are so great. I also admit, there's still room for improvement.

Funny enough, i think Google Docs opened the opportunity for products like LibreOffice, etc. to make some headways...because people who have simpler use-cases see that the previously more limited features of an online tool like google docs served the user good enough (not great, just good enough)...that office productivity tools became less a strategically essential tool, with obvious exceptions for niche cases, or cases where someone is using an excel file as a full database when they should not. So, i think this gave products like Libreoffice a chance to catch up, and users with non-niche use cases felt that this offereing is good enough, though of course nowadays its so much better! As you rightly stated: "it's also great that we even have those options and alternatives"!!

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#59

Post by mike_hearn »

rickcarlino wrote: post #32

In 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?

That's ChromeOS.

You may be thinking of Palm webOS which failed in the market, partly because it felt slower than Android, iirc.

Re: The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea

#60

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

jupp0r wrote: post #16
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.

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

Until you install the enough addons to VSCode to give it the same functionality JetBrains products have out of the box, then it gets slower.
Post reply on HN