I haven't tried it, but allegedly Outlook for Android runs better on Windows than the new Outlook for Windows. Which makes some sense, as one is a native app and one is a web app.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/i-ac...
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/i-ac...
I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work). Previously it was coupled to 'new' outlook only to promote adoption. But it really sees a lot of pushback from users. I hope this will continue into not canning the real outlook at all.
Microsoft are always pushing 'more change management' as a 'solution' but some changes are simply not good and it's normal for users to resist. If anything they push too much (like turning on features by default, and sending reminders that you have not used feature xyz enough last week through Viva Insights)
And the skullduggery they're doing with the consumer windows mail migration (pulling the user's email into their cloud without making this very clear) is totally out of line IMO.
Personally I don't even hate the web version so much. I use it daily because Microsoft never made a native outlook for my platform anyway. But I'm not a heavy user of mail and I do see its limitations.
google feels the same way. things that work need to be rebuilt and rereleased to justify headcount.
the mail -> new outlook is just another in the long tradition of microsoft pushing a new native gui framework, only to abandon it in house. How can they ever expect developers developers developers to commit to another future abandonware.
https://irrlicht3d.org/index.php?t=1626
they really should be going in reverse and making all their apps pure native and then getting them to also render as html.
Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).
Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.
They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.
So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.
And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.
Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.
(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)
They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.
And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.
Even though I don't want Microsoft to decide what's important and not in my inbox. I get so little I can easily do that myself because I block any and all unsolicited sales attempt forever - which Microsoft is trying to make harder because those people are their customer too! For while the 'new outlook' didn't even have the block sender option. Only the less severe report spam. But I want to block them (and ideally their entire company) forever.
This strategy works great for me and I often gloat over my trash folder with the many sales emails there "I know you're busy, you probably forgot to respond to my 20 previous emails but I proposed you another meeting, does tomorrow 2:00 suit? Here's the invite!". I love seeing them waste their time. Most of them seem actually manual even (despite most not even seeming to have bothered reading what I actually do)
I really hate Microsoft's approach to change management. They're only advocating what's best for them, not for the users. There's no win-win here, it's all them and they don't even attempt to hide it except under a really thin sleazy sales veneer.
I thought they were done developing the old outlook since they started hacking it instead of doing things properly. For example, in the rounded corner update for the old outlook, they started drawing black squares over message pane during resizing, probably to hide visual defects.
Glad to know there is a chance that they might keep the old outlook around.
Even the "round all the corners" changes seemed mostly "free" from component library upgrades from changes in other Office and Windows apps and components shared with "New Outlook" (on the one side: people keep assuming New Outlook is a bloated web app, especially because it has a lot of UI consistency with Outlook.com now, but there's a lot of evidence it is more complicated that just a web app; on the other side: a lot of those painting problems especially during resizing relate to Old Outlook has been partly "a web app" for a long time; hybrids apps are hybrid).
Still using the Outlook application installed on Windows. Recently purchased Office 2021 (for $40, they had a sale) which came with the Outlook application. It does get updates every now and then so I know they're still supporting it. I've been using the Outlook application for a few decades, no plan to stop, and I will never use their online version.
Never change Microsoft
The new Electron monster is horrible and looks like a toy.
The very latest and greatest version of Outlook, has broken Search. Not in a subtle way, no, as in the "remove focus from the goddamn text box after you've typed a couple of characters" kind of broken.
I've had to remove and re-add accounts to fix Outlook issues more than all other email client issues combined. This is especially prevalent with the mobile versions.
Do you know how many times I've had to reset the view after Outlook, for no reason discernible, decided to change it, delete it or simply corrupt the file. I stopped counting after I had to start using scientific notation.
We'll continue to disagree on the App versions of Outlook.
The web version is ok.. I will agree with you on that point.