The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
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 abandoned or not getting enough attention to make it a viable option.
From the above, it is understandable why teams in MS are building new products with Web tech. The Windows team should consider this a failure because Windows now has no good, viable option for GUI development.
I'd never be able to go back to scrolling with "skeleton rows" that's the web default because it can't render fast enough..
Edit: one detail I don't recall is what XUL actually uses for rendering components on-screen.
Are we using the same Thunderbird? For me it feels rather sluggish.
It is one reason why the other day we have a submission "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened"
Most people aren't latency sensitive. Or do not care about it enough. The world of computing has then settle of sluggish behaviour being the norm. As most are OK with it.
The question is whether that additional work is of any benefit to the user.
It's near instantaneous at everything, except when it's doing network operations. It literally does a keyword stem search on a 4GB mailbox in under a 1/10 of a second. That's the fastest inverted index lookup I've ever seen - all accomplished with just sqlite. I consider it amazing. It makes the old version of Outlook look like a dog. A one legged dog. And the leg is broken.
As others have noted, as soon at it has to access the network it slows down. A lot. And it you queue up enough operations, it can get confused - particularly if the network drops out in the middle and it has to re-sync everything. But it is imap, so I forgive it.
To get it's native non-networked speed, you do have to ensure every folder is downloaded to local storage. Do that, and it's amazingly quick.
It's cemented the perception of web desktop tech in many people's mind & I question whether it's possible to de-infect what has become a quite strongly held dogmatism. There's few apps broadly actually uses these days, so the opportunity is also troublingly slim. I want to ask, what are the contestible assertions, what would change your mind? But even for me it's hard to imagine finding sufficient leverage, having enough examples, to really challenge the negative perceptions.
For what it's worth, discord load time is a bit obnoxious but I've found it to be pretty performant once loaded, and I'm a fairly intense user who is on many dozens of servers.
Most people just try to see what the various tradeoffs are between alternatives. For desktop apps, we’re talking about Electron versus, say, Qt, Cocoa, WPF, or whatever.
The observation that web packaged apps are typically slower and typically have worse UIs is probably not being contested here. Likewise, the advantages of Electron for cutting costs and shipping apps faster is probably not being contested.
I think the only real question people have is, “Do you care?”
I used the desktop version of Discord for a few years. It seems like—well, a real piece of shit, to be honest. So I use the web client now. Performance is only really a problem when you scroll around, deep in the history of a channel. My point of reference is apps like Adium.
It's pretty comparable to Sublime on this machine. There are some operations where VSC is even clearly faster.
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.
True, but it's at the price of having an inferior product. But perhaps Microsoft doesn't care about that.
https://www.postbox-inc.com/
Won't be for everyone - it's not open source, not free and there's no Linux version (yet?). Personally I'm happy to pay for a professional / premium email client experience, since it's so mission-critical to my work.
They are updating the UI, and doing a good job https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/thunderbird-115-superno...
Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was quick, responsive, and efficient. Now it feels like wading through mud.
Everyone I know who uses it only does so because their employers require them to.
Early on it was an unstable crashy mess, but in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it.
I am ... not happy that the full client is slated to go away at some point in the future. I know Outlook well; I know how to wield it effectively and to make it behave in the way I want it to.
I have a Macbook and a Windows desktop PC at work. Outlook on the Mac is a tire fire, and it is the new WebView2 version. Horrendous. For the moment, I can get something like the full Windows Outlook application via Outlook for the Web, which is saying a lot, because it itself is an extremely watered-down version of the full Outlook email client on Windows.
Microsoft has been doing this a lot lately, and it's starting to make me a bit angry. They replace good stuff that they don't want to work on anymore with some web-enabled version or a version built on web technologies, which itself is a bad idea, even if the replacements were feature-complete compared to what they're replacing, but they're not. They're partial skeletons in comparison to what they're replacing. Toys. ALL of the advanced features that I have come to rely on in Outlook in the past 25 years are simply not present in Outlook for Mac.
It's a bad trend and I don't see it stopping. In another decade, the apps we have now will be replaced with something else once someone at Microsoft once again gets it inside their head that it'll be better to rewrite rather than to adopt the existing code, and that version will be even slimmer and more useless than what's coming out today.
We are choosing to make things worse every day and I do not understand it. I'm not saying that Outlook is a shining example of a good application, or that it is even in the top 10 email clients, I'm saying that I'm used to it and that I like it. It has continuously improved for 25 years and now it's slated to be replaced with a fucking webapp that's running locally.
What in the world are people smoking thinking that ease of development is paramount to performance for applications which are very interaction-heavy? Typing text into Outlook for Mac on an M1 with 32GB of RAM is not instantaneous. FOR AN EMAIL APPLICATION. Unacceptable, but this is the route they're choosing because development is easier...
I will never understand how web tech got so bad, and even if I do wind up understanding that, I will definitely not ever understand why people choose to use web technologies over things which have worked and have continually improved for decades.
I've been using it for as long as you, and I agree with these assessments. But those aren't the reasons why nobody I know uses it voluntarily, and everyone I personally know who uses it dislikes it.
Companies (actually the information security teams) may be taking shortcuts based on Microsoft’s recommendations to reduce their work while imposing a huge cost on every worker.
It used to be that companies were locked in with Windows and MS Office. But there were some alternative options for those. IMO, now companies are heavily locked in to Microsoft by subscribing to Microsoft365. There is no migrating out or exit path for this. They just have to suffer through whatever Microsoft puts them through.
So far the devs have kept up well, I can count the instances I had to fall back to OWA on one hand over the last year. And I use it daily within my company.
[1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-...
I don't usually use windows, but my employer uses Office 365, so I've been using Outlook web for several years now. It felt much snappier and more pleasant to use than the native client. I understand there are some features missing, but since I'm a very basic user (the most advanced thing I use is combining messages into conversations), it never bothered me.
The new Outlook UI looks extremely similar to the web one, and the app feels snappier on my machine. The thing I dislike the most is the empty space at the top of the window, but I guess that's just the current fashion.
I remember how much work I could get done in Outlook 2007 using a 1024x768 monitor on a crap workstation with 1GB RAM. I admit that this performance was often chilled by the many pitfalls of on-premise Exchange setups, lack of interop with non-Exchange services, and lack of standards-compatible email formats. Today's Outlook is less buggy, but slower.
This new version gives me the chills.
I can understand the platform change. I can begrudgingly learn to live with oversized UI elements, fat content spacing, etc.
I shuddered when finding that from an efficiency and automation standpoint it's a real downgrade. Things I experienced in one day of "Try the new Outlook":
- Keyboard shortcuts (some changed, some missing entirely)
- Context menu key did not work
- No single key operations in context menu (e.g. right click, d for Delete, a for Archive, etc)
- Limited view customization
- Janky UI reaction speed
- Window and component refresh lag / jank
- Reduced rule functionality
- There were a few more, but the traumatic experience wiped them out of my memoryContext menu key does nothing? That's weird -- I must need a new keyboard.
Generally I worry about the creeping consumerization of Office apps and what it means for power users. We're still out here, and we need power tools that work for us. Have the big space eye candy if you like, but please give us the option to turn the bling off and get down to work!
I think it's more about trapping you in the MS365 silo than anything. They want all your data in the cloud because it makes it makes it non-portable. I think the big push they'll make after the desktop apps are replaced will be about data governance because it let's them increase lock-in.
First they'll make a 100% online workflow a possibility. Next they'll convince businesses to abandon local files because it's "too risky". Then they'll start locking down everything that could be used for "data theft", including copy / paste. At that point they effectively own your data.
And it's not far fetched for them to lock down things like copy / paste. I think that's why there's been a big push for TPM and things like Passwordless. It's a solid base for authenticated / authorized actions. Yeah, they'll use it for authenticating to websites first, but there's no reason a similar system can't be used to support signed / authorized actions between apps.
So, when you copy text, it doesn't go straight onto the clipboard. Instead, the office app uses a TPM managed key to send a signed request to MS365. The TPM will have a key enrolled for office apps and will only encrypt/sign for trusted (think code signing) office apps, so Microsoft knows the request came from an official office app. You'll be logged in, so MS can check if you're authorized to copy the content to the clipboard. The public half of your TPM managed key will be stored in your MS365 account.
If you're authorized to copy content to the clipboard, MS will encrypt it with your public key and send it back. Your clipboard will have an encrypted copy of the text. When you go to paste, the receiving app will need to ask the TPM to decrypt the payload and (remember) the TPM will only let the key be used for a specific set of trusted apps, so the copied text will never touch an app that's not authorized.
Think of taking Passwordless, adding a TPM as a requirement, and using it for a workflow of app actions rather than auth actions. That's where we're headed IMO.
I'm at a manufacturer in the US in the NYC metro area, we pay $3k/month for 50 mbps guaranteed fiber internet (which we fully saturate). The upgrade to 100mbps was priced at $15k/month from the only provider in the area (used to be independent, then Optimum, and now all owned by the Altice monopoly)
It's a weird path Microsoft is on but I guess if only they want to knee cap their potential customer base long term, then :shrug:
But, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree that they should either develop or use a native framework (Flutter perhaps?) rather than trying to shoehorn a technology that has never been very good for application development.
Teams.
It absolutely has bugs and issues, but what it does and what it costs seem to easily outweigh those.
Yesterday i lost 5 minutes to change my picture profile in Teams. So good hidden.
+ other small antiuser features all over.
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.
All the releases that I can think of shunned the standard UI toolkits for their own homegrown UI. Presumably to show the Windows folks that the Office team is it's own little empire.
If you want an identical experience with identical code across the Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux then there is only one solution.
Cross-platform desktop apps, should at least cover Windows, OSX and Linux (appImage/Flatpak) as a baseline. Avalonia works well enough, but MAUI just muddied the waters. With the massive efforts towards web-ui in general, it's really not surprising that many devs/shops are just shrinkwrapping with Electron. Even if there are far lighter options for embedded browser usage of the system's browser engine. In the end, the state of desktop apps sucks all around.
I meant that comparing VSCode to the likes of JetBrains products and Eclipse isn't meaningful because JetBrains and Eclipse are fairly terrible in terms of performance and system load.
Comparing to native programs is more appropriate. Visual Studio is a native program, true, but I think it's a terrible one.
All that said, the IDE product space has become awful overall, and I struggle to find a modern good one. So, yeah...
How about vscode vs sublime, neovim, or any other native text editor with LSP support? vscode is slow comparatively.
But you're wrong on the menu side. They have keyboard shortcuts for everything. And you can program your own if you don't like the provided ones.
Of course most Electron apps don't have near the same level of effort or foresight when it comes to performance. Discord probably the second most common electron app, and Teams being third. Both of which, at the very least, have issues. Some could be overcome, or at least be more consistent with WASM built controllers, but that whole space needs some maturing and improved tooling. I've played with Tauri and Yew and think it's pretty nifty, but there's a lot of work to getting parity with say React+MUI.
React+MUI itself is pretty good. But even then, on a relatively large team with some relatively inexperienced devs, you can wind up with dependency trees that are insane, huge and slow. Taking that and going through the extra hurdles that the likes of Electron, Tauri or others add is burdonsome to say the least. It can be very nice, but usually isn't.
And while I empathize with the teams using Electron, I can even support the ideas. In the end, it's the outcome that matters. I'm not one of the never-electron types. But I also recognize the issues. I use Tabby for my terminal, which is fast enough, but still takes 3-4 seconds to load. I use VS Code which is usually a couple seconds as well. It drops off dramatically from there.
There are massive advantages a browser renderer offers... it gets all taken away by importing whatever library comes up in your npm search for any given thing.
Seems to me this is kinda the core of the matter. VSCode written by developers, for developers, working in the domain of...development. It's almost a labor of love at that point.
Anyway, they don’t care. Nadella has us all by the monthly subscripted balls.
They really do. A lot of their products feel like a "too many cooks" situation where there's too many things being packed into a UI that can't exactly handle it. To make matters worse, the errors you get when something fails aren't too helpful and they are used across various Microsoft platforms. You have to always ensure you're looking for help on PowerBI vs PowerBI developer or PowerQuery.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
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).
Same goes for Android/iOS.
These new Microsoft applications run on all these platforms identically across all these platforms and mostly with the same code.
Qt has had decades to win over this space and failed. Github slapped Chromium together with Nodejs and took over the entire market of cross platform GUI development overnight.
I might not like it but I understand it completely.
As someone who is currently working on several QT apps that also work on mobile: That's an absolute lie. You need a lot of extra work to get it to work on both the desktop and mobile. Realistically you have to build the UI twice, QML is nowhere near as "responsive" as html/css. It's also prone to sluggishness.
I stick with Qt because I enjoy working in C++, it's just simpler to have the whole app in one language. My users also told me they dislike electron like you. But it's very disingenuous to tell people that Qt is "just as easy" to build desktop/mobile hybrid apps, they'll be sorely disappointed if they take your word.
Just because it's the best on that has ever existed, doesn't make it good. It's just the least bad.
>Nobody has ever been able to make this work outside of the web browser.
Sure would be nice if everyone would give up then and we could go back to having nice, native apps using native controls, file operations, encoding, hardware access, performance, UI/UX patterns, and security features, instead of letting all that rot on the vine while we reinvent the wheel on the browser.
The web browser features a set of technologies that are standardized across a wide array of different implementations. Except for a few minor differences, you can view a website in Safari, Chrome, FireFox, Edge, Brave, the list goes on.
It's a technological wonder. I'm still amazed people hate on it.
And you’ve ignored the fact that every web view we have had on desktop so far is kinda crappy and sluggish when at least well built native apps generally feel snappy.
Webviews are one step about shitty Java apps (you know the ones) in terms of UI.
Beyond that there’s the RAM usage.
Be no longer amazed that people can have these problems which no web app they have used has overcome on three or four different computing platforms.
People have been trying to make that since the dawn of computers. But designing something like that top-down has proven virtually impossible to get right. Building it bottom-up like we have with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and now even WASM ensures that what gets built is actually secure and practical. It might not be pretty but it works.
Even performance, which is the number one criticism of electron apps, is something that can be solved. When you Microsoft looking at making the webview a common reuable component again, what is native between something like WPF/XAML and DOM/HTML is merely a matter of perspective.
Because they're fucking Microsoft. Mutilated websites posing as apps are for hobby projects. They're in charge of the vast majority of desktop operating system interaction, if my pitiful 17 dev company can write all-native programs, so can they.
For unrelated reasons, I found myself in a state of rage and removed the Edge browser from my Windows installation in it's entirety.
Outlook no longer works...I guess you need Edge, or maybe some components are shared...
I am now using Thunderbird.
I just felt like sharing...
Specifically, I get my email at outlook.office.com. Works great in Safari and Chrome on Mac.
Searching old emails is way faster and easier in the web version. It takes up no space on my machine, and there are not thousands of potentially sensitive emails sitting on the hard drive of a laptop I carry around. Way better all around.
I also run Teams in a Chrome tab instead of the Mac app. It runs way more efficiently that way for some reason.
Do Mac computers not encrypt their drives? Like Bitlocker on Windows?
Having sensitive information on your laptop should not be a worry if your IT team does their job right.
Realize there are probably hundreds of UI designers working at MS who need to look busy.
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 control over the software we use is getting taken away from us (for a variety of reasons).
Either way, software that meets the users and their needs where they are is great! Someone will benefit from cloud based software, someone else with local software that's very popular, whereas others will just be happy to get by for free.
Of course, it's also great that we even have those options and alternatives in the first place!
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"!!
The new Desktop outlook is a bad idea because it supports only Office 365 and not on-prem exchange.
(Which itself is a speculative claim with no substantiation except one anecdote)
However the number of times I need to log into Gmail to see my email because it doesn’t render correctly in Windows Mail is just too dang high.
My intuition tells me Windows Mail is using the old pre-Blink Edge engine and if they could just switch that to new Blink Edge then that would make me so very happy.
I use the web version when I need only my “online” inbox, to check email and answer quickly, like a first parse including flagging, categorizing, and replying quickly. Because hotkey shortcut combos are different or non-existent and access to local mailbox PST files is not available I use the desktop version for the archiving, filing, and eventual researching and answering with attachments, etc.
I make extensive use of categories and the search folders feature of the desktop version and I made my workflow into just two archive folders INBOX and SENT where every single message that was saved is properly categorized.
The new outlook cannot access my archive and it’s also horrible at search, like it’s desktop brethren.
Finally, I use Outlook because it is m365 and mandated by IT.
For personal email I use Gmail and mailspring.
I can't imagine someone who needs Excel dealing with non-Microsoft equivalents because Outlook is making its webapp its official app like Teams - and you could see the writing on the wall there for a long time.
No less than 3 (THREE) pop-ups, huge banner ads everywhere, VIDEO pop-up. Writers make less and less money with writing; advertisers are getting desperate; readers frustrated and information lost - leaking from a pipe riddled with holes.
And we pretend to be capable of making contact with a new form of intelligent life? This consciousness is watching us, molding us, and we do not know if it is attempting to co-exist with us or change us for its own purpose. We have a lot to learn. There needs to be a revolution of the mind.I have no idea why people would like Outlook, it's an inferior experience compared to other email clients and calendar applications in my opinion. I can't even have my personal gmail calendar imported into my work calendar so nobody can schedule meetings for me when I'm picking up kids from a school event or have a dentist appointment. I have to sync calendars by hand.
There definitely ARE limits to it -- I've never tried to merge personal stuff into my work cal, as you seem to want to do -- but for what it does, it's the best I've seen.
I used the new Outlook just long enough to see it was horrible at using existing rules and making new ones and just didn't try anything else. But I can't imagine why they would fix one little thing like properly handling inline quoting when they wrecked the remainder of what had been a decent corporate email app.
Or asked another way, what would make you pay for an outlook alternative?
That's OK though. If you look at this thread, you can see there's been a shift in what people mean when they say "native". It used to be well defined: Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on OS X/iOS, GTK or Qt on Linux, app written in a C-derived language. Nowadays people are using it to mean "not web".
Why has this occurred, well, most people don't really care what exact libraries or languages an app uses. What they care about is the user experience. People are using the word native to mean stuff like, works offline, works with files, isn't too laggy, consumes reasonable amounts of RAM, integrates well with the OS. And above all - uses a sophisticated GUI toolkit. A big part of the native vs web experience gap is that although HTML has a lot of styling functionality it's a seriously impoverished UI toolkit, barely reaching Win 3.1 standards out of the box. So people roll their own widget toolkits that they layer on top, but none of them are all that good and the modern culture of conflating widget toolkits with design systems means they are constantly being tossed out and redone from scratch (this isn't unique to the web, Jetpack Compose has the same issue).
The result is that many widgets taken for granted by Windows 95 users like splitters, menu bars, status bars, pervasive keyboard accelerators, virtualized and editable table views, tree views, customizable toolbars, draggable tabs, floating tool windows etc are just gone and power users are the first to notice this.
You can therefore satisfy people's desire for native apps by providing that sort of UX regardless of what actual tools you use to do so.
So far nobody said yes.
That said, on the Mac at least, there are a number of paid email clients that are fairly popular and seem to be sustainable, so maybe there is a market after all. I always figured those apps were more “a native app for Gmail” than for Exchange.
All the Microsoft Office seems to be going to web programming for use on the Microsoft 365 websites and a unified codebase for PWAs / "native" clients that are WebViews or similar.
This leads me to believe that the future of Windows is as a ChromeOS-like thin client with everything happening in Azure to maximize Azure use, enable Copilot / AI, and increase subscription revenues.
I have not been able to get it working again for more than a year, after setting up O365 account.
The attempts to get it working again involve MS-developed special utility program(s) -- but this has never fixed the problem for me.
I gave the problem to our IT support people. They tried but ultimately gave up and asked if I would just use the web-based Outlook instead. What was I going to do? Say, no?
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.
You may be thinking of Palm webOS which failed in the market, partly because it felt slower than Android, iirc.
The 'groups' functionality is decent.. so sad they hide buttons and kinda just stopped working on it.
utterly ludicrous that MS would make this available to everyone and not offer an official way to turn it off for a couple of months AFTER the release to public.
So sick of MS pulling this stunt.