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 well done!
Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.
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.
You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.
It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
The downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone?
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.
Generally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.
it really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day
Depending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.
The "new" Outlook is older than Copilot, so we can't blame the AI here. Don't take this as defense of the new Outlook - I hate it with the same passion.
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.
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 on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".
Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.
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...
Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.
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.
At my last job I was responsible for 70 windows 11 machines. At my current job it’s 20. These are i7/i9 spec with 64+GB memory and NVMe drives. No endpoint management software, just Intune for device registration.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
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
Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.
If i was in charge at MS, I'd go full return to monke and put a lot of devs into making winforms work great with 4k and high DPI. Then rebuild the most critical apps with winforms using a new layouting engine and some wpf concepts carried over. Nothing new or fancy, just old but gold.
Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago.
The issue is, as the product continues to generate revenue, the product team continues to get funding and they are forced to add bloat as new features.
Same with security and compliance standards at companies. You keep pouring more money, and you keep getting more fort walls and dungeons, without any regard to productivity and performance impact.
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.
The "free" version of outlook that replaced Mail is so bad that it made me finally switch to Thunderbird and I don't see myself going back anytime soon.
The only thing I'm missing sometimes is the Copilot integration, but copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook...
Why are you not on thunderbird yet? Why do you get Windows notifications? Are you using Windows? I don't understand how there are people who can notice such things but still use windows in 2026. Also, please don't write with AI. This post was written with AI.
The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows.
I see a freaking loading screen with the Outlook logo for 5 seconds before the window is updated with the meeting name along with a button to dismiss it. Yes that's everything in there.
Clicking a Teams meeting link from Outlook Calendar opens the pre-meeting screen to allow enable/disable of camera/microphone, plus it also loads up a little reminder window with Join and Dismiss buttons _over the top_ of the Join button of the pre-meeting screen.
Every time.
And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.
I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.
Where does it break nav? Honest question, because I have been living inside it for almost 7 years now and actually prefer it to any of the desktop clients (except on the Mac).
On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API.
(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
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The switch to hardware-accelerated rendering was poor. It's still causing issues today. Is it the graphic drivers' fault or their poor implementation? Who knows, but they also disabled the switch that allowed to turn it off, which is just classic Microsoft being annoying.
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 them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still.
Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
its faster to use an LLM + MCP (chatgpt or claude integration cloud integration) to search your email than to use the search field in the web browser now
its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
Yea, everyone is trashing on Outlook web while Gmail is over there doing same exact shit. Even worse, Gmail has never well integrated all its features. Apparently having easy access to my full calendar requires a new tab.
Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.
that people still buy this, businesses still rely on their infrastructure, and their stock is somehow world-class is outstanding for the fact that its operating system can't do what middle school level coders can accomplish
Are we talking about the same Outlook here? And I mean that sincerely. I just joined a new company and now have to use MS software for the first time since Windows 7. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, you name it, are all a clunky mess (at least on MacOs).
Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.
Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.
Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.
Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..
[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.
No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:
1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.
2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.
I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.
This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant.
Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.
Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
They so screwed Outlook. The stupid thing refuses to respond after switching to a diff network or SSID till it’s completed some synchronization of some kind. The stupid app refuses to come into focus.
I really don’t need the freshest view at once. Maybe I just need to look at an open email you dog of an app!
Why did they castrate Outlook? Does MS hate itself? What in the name of shit are they thinking? Who does this make happy?
What I don't understand is why search is so broken.
If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?
Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.
Fastmail also has a web based email client, which is as fast as (if not faster than) Outlook Classic.
The new Outlook is just bad. Load order is wrong, it renders everything on every window, loads unnecessary data, etc. Plain annoying.
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 well done!
It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
Written on my windows phone 7 series 7
- Satya Nadella
THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
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 on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
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 mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.
https://housecat.com/
The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.
Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...
The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.
They all have _very significant _ performance issues out of the box, with very long app startups, and very confusing slowdowns. I am 99% sure it’s windows defender doing an absolute crap ton of work on every single file open, and ignoring file and folder exclusions.
I’m struggling to understand what their end goal is. How much can you half ass everything until your entire company becomes just a nuisance.
A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.
Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.
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
The issue is, as the product continues to generate revenue, the product team continues to get funding and they are forced to add bloat as new features.
Same with security and compliance standards at companies. You keep pouring more money, and you keep getting more fort walls and dungeons, without any regard to productivity and performance impact.
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.
The only thing I'm missing sometimes is the Copilot integration, but copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook...
I see a freaking loading screen with the Outlook logo for 5 seconds before the window is updated with the meeting name along with a button to dismiss it. Yes that's everything in there.
How does Microsoft think this is ok?
Every time.
And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.
I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
(Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
I can't think of anything useful they added but as usual lots they ruined
The threaded message indicator UI was brilliant. Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZOXHG6NDw
Screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KyZOXHG6NDw/hqdefault.jpg
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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 them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still.
Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
F OneDrive.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...
that people still buy this, businesses still rely on their infrastructure, and their stock is somehow world-class is outstanding for the fact that its operating system can't do what middle school level coders can accomplish
Kudos to the team. I think this is same team that maintains Office Suite for Mac.
I hope to see Teams for Mac in the future. Current Teams app is dogshit.
Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.
Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.
Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..
[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.
No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:
1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.
2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.
I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.
This is just Microsoft's poor strategic decision to try to drive as many as possible to Linux. Hell, weren't they bragging recently about managing to make opening the start menu take only a tenth of a second? It should be instant.
Maybe they think we'll replace users with AI, too. AI is the only thing slower than Microsoft's UIs lately.
That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.
We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?
Edit: Corrected the scale factor.
That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!
I really don’t need the freshest view at once. Maybe I just need to look at an open email you dog of an app!
Why did they castrate Outlook? Does MS hate itself? What in the name of shit are they thinking? Who does this make happy?
If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?
Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.