> Outlook is based on WebView2, and like all web apps, it’s slow<p>Fastmail also has a web based email client, which is as fast as (if not faster than) Outlook Classic.<p>The new Outlook is just bad. Load order is wrong, it renders everything on every window, loads unnecessary data, etc. Plain annoying.
IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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
Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
I think it really could. You can vibe-code efficient software, if you care.<p>Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
It is. Classic outlook didn't intermingle ads into your inbox. That feature alone makes new outlook much better.<p>Written on my windows phone 7 series 7<p>- Satya Nadella
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.
It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
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.<p>THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
It's not just Windows. It's everything Microsoft.<p>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)<p>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.<p>It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?<p>This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out.<p>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.<p>I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.<p><a href="https://housecat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://housecat.com/</a><p>The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".<p>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).<p>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.<p>The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.
Sounds like something is wrong with your system.<p>My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.
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.<p>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.
Just give her a little of the ole "works on my machine."
Microslop at its best.<p>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.
I have had the same thought for years. I guess their monopoly makes them able not to care about quality (and does not depend on it).<p>A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.
Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 "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.<p>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...
The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows.<p>I see a freaking <i>loading screen</i> 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.<p>How does Microsoft think this is ok?
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.<p>Every time.<p>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.<p>I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa...
Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
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.
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
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<p>its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite
new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
Just tried it. It loads instantly and then loads some other stuff I never seen before. However for me the main thing still loads instantly.
Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
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.
Decisions of a company with no competition.
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.
Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.<p><a href="https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-1-2gb-ram-on-windows-11-even-as-microsoft-kills-web-app-slop/" rel="nofollow">https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...</a>
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
microsoft is an amazing study in managed decline<p>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
Outlook for Mac is surprisingly good, though. Every interaction feels (and is) native.<p>Kudos to the team. I think this is same team that maintains Office Suite for Mac.<p>I hope to see Teams for Mac in the future. Current Teams app is dogshit.
Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..<p>[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.
> like all web apps, it’s slow<p>No, that's a very uninformed take, and contradicted on two fronts:<p>1. Microsoft's other native apps have gotten unusably slow lately, too.<p>2. There's definitely plenty of fast web apps.<p>I don't mind snark, but make it factually accurate.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Another way to say tenth of a second is 100,000,000 nanoseconds.<p>We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?<p>Edit: Corrected the scale factor.
What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.