If you have considered switching to Linux and worried that it would be a chore, give it a shot (if you have the freedom to choose). It has been polished and ready since at least 2019. I have to use a Windows machine for work and, like this New Outlook issue shows, MSFT has concluded most users can't or won't leave so there's no margin in improving UX and some margin in doing things that make UX much worse. I don't think I'll elect to have a personal Windows machine ever again in my life.

Outlook is based on WebView2, and like all web apps, it’s slow

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.

THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.

Hah, it even has in-app purchases, for AI writing...

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.

A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft (long ago). One day I was complaining to him about some package that Microsoft had put out. "It's so slow!" I said. He replied, nonchalantly: "buy Intel stock. People will have to upgrade their PCs!"

Second one is from about 15 years ago. At one of the local meetups, I was chatting with a long-lost friend who worked for Yahoo. He was describing their recently-concluded Search deal with Microsoft, and how it worked in practice. This was an issue he had raised with Microsoft engineers and gotten no traction on their side. (This is all from memory). Basically, he described how a search request from an European user was handled by Yahoo Search. So, say someone goes to "search.yahoo.de" and enters a search term and it triggers a request at some Yahoo server in an EU datacenter. According to the deal, that would be forwarded to a Microsoft server, based in Virginia. Now, since the request was from EU, the Microsoft server would turn around and make a request to a MS server based in EU. Which would then respond with the search results to the MS server in VA. Which would then send the response back to the Yahoo server in EU. So, basically, 4 cross-Atlantic hops for one search request. He claimed latency figures of around 1500ms, when their internal goal was to keep latency below 300ms (after which it becomes noticeable and hurts metrics?). But when he brought up this massive latency spike to his counterparts in MS, they just shrugged it off.

To be honest, this is the same in almost all apps that have any more than 10 developers working on them (my estimate!). Death by dependencies and a lack of coherent design.

As someone else said, though, some things like fastmail work OK in the browser so it is possible.

So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ? Who knows...

If I have to use this new version for longer than 2 weeks I am switching to some other client.

And also, who knows, maybe they are purposefully inserting these show-stopping bugs to get people to switch.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/replying-to-or-for...

https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4

Windows 11 ships with two versions of Outlook. There is Outlook Classic, the long-running Win32 desktop app built for power users, and there is the new Outlook, which Microsoft is pushing as the future of email on Windows. The newer one is built on WebView2 and is, in essence, a browser window that loads Outlook.com. If you have ever used both side by side, you already know which one feels faster and which one does not.

This is bizarre. Kyle Rubenok, according to his LinkedIn and GitHub @krubenok, is the senior manager for the outlook product. Isn't he taking any responsibility for how poorly his product performs? In many regular companies, such a manager would be fired for managing a product into decline. I guess I don't understand how big US corporations work.

Dear Lord, how has the software gotten this much worse in 19 years? I thought that Thunderbird was bloated and awful... until I tried Outlook, in a browser, on Linux. Now, the Thunderbird experience is shockingly pleasurable, compared.

Don't even get me started on the horror that is trying to mix left-to-right and right-to-left languages within the same document. OpenOffice figured this out a decade ago. Google Docs has done this perfectly since the beginning. When I learned that it was genuinely this bad on Windows too, my mind was blown.

I don't understand how this is possible.

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.

also, idk when, but the talent level of a "msft engineer" from 90s to early 2000s feels like they runs laps around the msft engineers of today. it's hard to not feel that the suits cannibalized what was at one point an extremely profitable company with great engineering culture for nothing but shortsighted gains

the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.

In the old days, we would have cried about 150MB memory usage idle as being bloat. Why isn't it 30 to 60MB. Now 150MB is still so much better than 600MB.

I am not sure if Native will ever win. I do wonder if we could somehow make webview, or may be a subset of webview that is as fast as native.

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...

Speaking of memory, the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.

They really picked the wrong timeline in which to 4x RAM usage for no benefit.

My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it.

My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it.

So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?

If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.

It's incredible when we have AI assistants that slow shit like that still ships in products affecting millions of users. Imagine how much totally wasted energy that costs just because the companies are cheap. Just port it to Rust and run it as webassembly at least.

What email power feature are folks using that necessitates using Outlook natively?

Happens on Windows/Mac

It seems to do an update check before rendering any UI, if there’s an update it must download and apply it before showing the UI. To a user trying to open the app, it’s as if it’s broken not loading.

It’s a massive pain, trying to access email but need to wait five minutes as the app decides it’s not going to open and update instead of giving the option not to, or doing it transparently in the background so app useable and prompting to restart when ready

Trying to save files in office is just as frustrating. Some dark UX going on making it difficult to save locally instead of in one drive.

The windows operating system does more to disrupt my work flow than it does to assist it, the WSL layer so you can do any development helps, but I'm only using Windows at this point for games, and even then I barely play them so I'm mostly running Windows on one of my systems because it is already installed.

If apple / linux up the game support I would most likely never use Windows again.

Nowadays everything is cloude based including e-mails, you have zero reasons to use Windows as an end user.

Adobe is RIP and the alternative supports Linux, gaming is no longer excuse and in fact, games anti-cheat require kernel level access on Windows, that will never happen on Linux.

Companies still use Windows because they can track everything, Microsoft Teams is more than just a chat, it tracks your status, keyboard usage, interaction with teams, camera on/off during meeting, mic, etc.

Companies can build a whole profile from your Teams data.

Windows is the most unsecure OS, it has always been, so companies can spend millions or billions of dollars on tools and services to make Windows somewhat usable.

Also, forcing engineers to use Windows to manage Linux servers has to be the most nonsense thing ever.

Make that makes sense.

I don't doubt the new one is slower, but it seems odd that that's the only video that doesn't show the taskbar.

Search for a meeting: it shows you the oldest first.

Busy search calendars? It may or may not show working hours. It’s incapable of helpfully locating a mutually agreeable time in the way more modern agents can.

Search for mail? It’s an abomination trying to prioritize what you actually want.

The settings aren’t intuitively organized and a hodgepodge of UI standards.

But seriously, can we please make desktop productivity apps not suck on windows? I started programming on windows, old school Win32 with a little MFC. Still have the super thick MFC book from MikeB somewhere in the closet. It was better than the alternatives at the time.

Now I look at the windows developer site and I can't even figure out what happened since I stopped Win32 programming at around 2004. It's a total train wreck of abandoned technology, each worse than the previous ones.

Office (and to some degree visual studio), used to be the lighthouse, best in breed application, often using api's that were not yet public and styles that were not yet adopted. I remember buying component libraries that emulated these to make better looking and performing apps.

I'd look at windows again if they would make apps not suck and be ones that the industry strives to emulate. Without that, Linux or Mac is just as good (actually better since they have decent userlands).

Although I don't love it and avoided it for many years I've noticed a lot of these issues went away with the new Outlook. I can load and unload shared mailboxes on demand and I stopped worrying about cache mode settings about five minutes after I switched to it.

It's not great, it's not terrible, like most software I use. But I would have always said the same about Outlook Classic.

Bottom line for me is that MS has Classic on maintenance mode and it's only a matter of time before it's gone.

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?

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.

“Microsoft listed 15 productivity features [including] richer Copilot integration…”

Dumb-@$$ Copilot in Outlook. The other day I needed to list all of the file attachments for a particular email. Copilot couldn’t do it. But it could suss my impatience.

[even when the top-level tracking preferences look full off, if you dig down you'll find some “part” on, and you can't set them full-off (you are blocked from disabling tracking by Amazon at least)]

[Mental note to self: add “windowslatest.com” to “are you really sure you want to go there?” DNS greylist]

One of these years, Windows might become production-ready again.

Teams takes 2gig of memory on launch, and still misses keystrokes because it is so unresponsive. Click on someone and start typing and half your chat isn't recorded. Absolute hot garbage.

Outlook isn't much better.

People who worked on them should be ashamed to consider these products shippable.

its also possibly cheaper than the monthly licence fee for the desktop app suite

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

I'm also don't agree with the assertions that you cannot address performance issues in a web based application. The actual email rendering in Outlook classic is still an embedded browser engine. Now it's just doing more of the application. If anything VS Code and the underlying editor system should show that you really can create pretty responsive applications on a browser surface... no, it's not the fastest, but if you're comparing to a lot of "full" IDE applications, it's a massive improvement... Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags.

There's plenty of room for improvement in these applications... I think the web shift is more to support cross platform better than it is to avoid optimization. At this point, they really want to be able to support Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and maybe unofficially Linux. The browser is the best bet to make that happen. I think that wasm can bridge a lot of the performance issues where service interactions go beyond the immediate state. With the rust ecosystem as good as it is for wasm target usage, I'm frankly surprised more of the logic isn't already there instead of JS. That said, I don't know how much is effectively asm.js or electronic translations to JS, or relying on server functionality. I haven't dug that deep.

That said, there's plenty of room to optimize web based applications. Even if it comes down to single-channel RDP application shells to a server-running application remotely. I think the point is to share as much as possible and support as broad an audience as they can. I think this is still happening in a context where three are still those that are trying to keep Windows on top and ignore Linux, while others in the org want to fully embrace it.

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 if only Linux were to offer a useful GUI ...

Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-...

It's the "blink twice if you're okay" test for them.

On a side note, how long did it take for IBM to go from being everywhere to becoming irrelevant?

They can't find 5 to build a native app for a platform used by a billion people?

Like really now? Why the f is this a web app? What's the point of an OS then?

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?

like all web apps, it’s slow

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.

But in all seriousness, if MS really did believe in copilot, there would be no need to write webapp slop. They could just write native app slop.