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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

They've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.

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Similar to how WinDev keeps pushing WinUI as the successor, while it is still quite lacking versus UWP, which was already quite lacking versus WPF.

It is no accident that WPF has been reborn at BUILD 2024, as the 2nd official way to do Windows apps.

And in the end it hardly matters, as the business apps unit is now full of people that only understand Web, probably started using Windows when they joined Microsoft, and keep shipping stuff stuck into Web widgets.

I will keep using "classic" for as long as possible. This trend to turn everything into painfully slow web apps is really getting on my nerves. As an example, I use quick steps very frequently to categorize emails. In classic Outlook, I click the button and the email is moved immediately - in the new Outlook it has a ~1 second delay until the email is moved and I can move the next one. Takes so long to get through my inbox.

I've been using outlook 2010 for 15 years (+ and old license of "lookeen")

it seems to be the least bad version I've encountered for an exchange client that seems compatible with modern exchange

if I had super modern exchange and had to use the latest desktop client, I'd probably just use the webclient at this point as it's probably better

ultimately, I'd take gmail over any incarnation of MS mail apps these days (including outlook 2010)

In classic Outlook, I really hate the animated lagging cursor when composing. Seems like it can't be disabled any more? (Same with Excel)

Maybe this is to prepare us for slower new Outlook?

> Seems like it can't be disabled any more?

Try that checkbox: https://www.howtogeek.com/742678/how-to-turn-off-animations-...

Thanks much! It was making me sea-sick.

Didn't know it moved from Office settings to Windows settings! Although now my Start menu animation is lost... I hate these tradeoffs.

I discovered that setting after building a new desktop PC recently. It was disappointing to find the awful keyboard lag introduced by the new OS, as I use MS Office daily.

About start menu animations, I actually prefer the UX without them. I press the Win key and the menu appears, no need to wait.

MS: just buy a faster CPU, not my problem

Not only does the UI suck, most keyboard shortcuts also no longer work or are just way to slow for my workflow.

Same with msteams. I have mistakenly called so many groups by accidentally pressing Ctrl shift C instead of Ctrl shift v (unformatted paste). When I ask Microsoft people, they say they use power toys to disable this shortcut so they know this is a problem...

That's a hate of mine too I use the keyboard quite a bit in Outlook. No shortcuts in (new).

Yep, it's my fault guys, sorry: I just migrated my grandma from Outlook 2007 to the new Outlook last week, so of course they have to deprecate it. Keeping the oldies sharp by having them learn new UI patterns every now and then

MS Teams is a UX disaster zone. So if that is any indication, the new Outlook might not be that great. MS is oddly inept building good UIs lately. Things like Outlook and Office are still a big part of their revenue; so it's kind of odd just how terrible their products are.

I haven't used Office in over a decade. Just not a thing in startups. But teams seems to be a necessary evil to be able to talk with our customers who insist on using it. So I get exposed to that quite a bit. Horrible bit of software.

Outlook new is missing one fundamental feature which is automation. This blob of html can not be programmed unlike predecessors for more 15 years.

It is so easy to instantiate and use old outlook that I really fail to understand what is their endgame with this killing of a top and well respected product.

I think the article has it correct, its their way of forcing all users to have their emails stored and scraped by Microsoft, no matter the provider.

Need more free training data!

The most annoying part is the times outlook automatically updated to new outlook, of which I was not notified and could not decline. I guess it vacuumed up all my email data those times, even though I “reverted” to legacy outlook

I switched to doing most of the automation in power automate

This of course only works with exchange afaik, but why else would I use outlook.

Not to mention the rather consistent crashing. I see it across multiple systems which makes me wonder if the developers even use it themselves.

Yeah they did the same with the Mac version. It's still a real app, not electron. But it lacked features and still does. For example when you set your out of office you no longer have the ability to auto-decline all your meetings during this period.

And the "Block sender" button was missing for about a year until it was reintroduced (and now it is still missing from the mobile outlook app!). I always block sender instead of move to spam. Which MS wants to avoid people using because many spammers are their Office 365 customers too :(

Years ago, they made Outlook the web email service and I thought they were going to deprecate Outlook the application and keep the name for the web email. But man this is confusing. Too many things are called Outlook.

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