Congrats to the new outlook team on the performance improvements, I certain it used to take 30 seconds to do it, and they've cut it to 10s !!

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).

> 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.

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.

THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.

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).

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

Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?

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.

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.

This year, for the first time since 2006 I've have Outlook and friends in my life. I run Linux, so naturally I turned to firefox.. Not a win. Fair, I use Chrome only for these products.

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.

Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?

They have enough employees to build native apps that run super quick but are still seduced by the web portability argument which, as we all know, is mostly untrue even now and which introduces all kinds of non-deterministic latencies/errors, which cannot all be handled neatly.

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.

Microsoft has always been careless about performance. Two anecdotes:

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.

As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”

Just a classic example of bloating degradation that happens to any software which has saturated all basic needs decades ago.

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.

I'm reminded of the Teams team making a comparison video between their old and new versions, which only went to show that the new version was also really slow (9 seconds).

https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4

I have always been amazed at how outlook just seems to always get worse. When I first used it decades ago I found it awful but it had a logic to it, now it is worse and makes no sense in the current world of options.

We’re still on old Outlook and I’m not sure what we are going to do when Microsoft cancels it. The New Outlook preview release came out 4 years ago. If it was ever going to not be a piece of crap it would’ve happened by now.

Hardware has become insanely fast, while software has become absurdly inefficient. During the Windows XP era, I use to browse the internet even on dial-up connections, use Yahoo Messenger, and run everything on a desktop with just 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk, everything worked, but today basic use on Windows often need a minimum 8gb ram. I wish I could go back.

My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.

I will say, a positive thing that has come out of msft's 20ish year run of consistent incompetence and piss poor leadership, is that there are quite a few former msft engineers (now retired) that are posting great lectures and educational content on youtube.

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 "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.

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...

JavaScript needs to do whatever JavaScript needs to do.

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 was really behind the push to get everything browser based in the first place? Is this all to make everything cloud based, software as a service, or did some exec see a demo of Windows 8 and think "web is the future" and over-rotate?

On the subject of Microsoft gripes, MS Purview removing focus from a text box for several seconds every time I paste something is driving me insane. Was just enabled recently at my org, but apparently has been a problem since 2024 at the earliest: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/answers/questions/1791527/...

The mobile app does this too. When you open a notification it first brings you to an old email you already had open and it takes a number of seconds before that's replaced by the one you were notified for.

It's really hard to understand how these trillion dollar companies somehow can't afford to maintain quality apps. Seems every new Office release makes things worse. I assume the WebView2 makes things a little easier for devs but how much are they really saving at the expense of quality? And I have no idea what the product managers are doing. They are certainly not thinking about improving the product. The new Outlook and Teams feel like they are being hacked together by a bunch of interns that are trying out Scrum.

> 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.

2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.

A pool of notifaction-agents trying to upsale copilot or staying quiet, is stateful aka a turing machine. If you use enough of these agents they can draw and behave like any software e.g. outlook

hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!)

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?

That is why I said the 2x improvement about Webview they said earlier doesn't matter. And I believe the 10sec already accounted for the 2x improvements.

>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.

If i was in charge at MS, I'd go full return to monke and put a lot of devs into making winforms work great with 4k and high DPI. Then rebuild the most critical apps with winforms using a new layouting engine and some wpf concepts carried over. Nothing new or fancy, just old but gold.

New Outlook doesn't even have feature parity with Outlook Classic.

https://archive.is/pcRNR for those who prefer minimal stalking as they travel the web.

[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]

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.

At this point I’m convinced that the only people working at Microsoft are those who nobody else would hire. There is no way a self-respecting person would be ok creating garbage like this, day in and day out.

The biggest issue I have with new outlook is meeting notifications (reminders) on Windows.

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 couldn't even get new Outlook to sync with some email accounts. And my Office 2019 licenses will stop working next month due to a cert expiry Trojan horse baked in by Microsoft. Why does MS think I will ever want to pay them for anything ever again?

New Outlook also does not do IMAP for me at all. Even though it says it does, sending you on a nice time wasting goose hunt. Thank you MS.

Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do real work on, and they resolved that enough for the market.

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.

Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.

It should be based on Team's code base :-)

At this point I would pay up front (one-time fee) for a Windows email client that rendered fast, worked with multiple account types including Outlook, had a nice simple interface so I can focus on the messages, and didn't have AI stuffed into it. Seems like we just don't have that.

Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".

Even the damn Artemis astronauts on the way to the moon had to call home to troubleshoot Outlook

Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!

The funny thing is that the Outlook client for Mac is a native app and it's way better than the Windows client.

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.

Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?

Web apps are a scourge.

Why is anyone still using Windows in a year greater than 2010?

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

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

Is this why Outlook for Mac is such crap?

Win11 may be the best thing for Linux. After all, people who are pissed by Win11 may eventually change operating systems.

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

"Old" Outlook is slow enough as well. Especially with Corporate "security" software.

New outlook also pre loads ads and it takes a few seconds for the paid verification to go through before the ads go away. Very frustrating clicking on the first email at load time only to realize it is an ad. Just the icing on the sh*t cake.

Is anybody still using email in 2026?

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

How else would we know Microsoft is still Microsoft?

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?

Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.

I have ~3 lower/mid range Linux laptops and 1x mid/high range windows gaming laptop. It's amazing how slow the windows machine is despite being an absolute beast compared to the linux machines, which have way worse specs.

Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.

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

I wonder how many MS engineers are lamenting how superior Classic Outlook is for AI integration. COM and VBA let cc do pretty much everything.

Outlook for Mac is surprisingly good, though. Every interaction feels (and is) native.

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.

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.

microsoft is an amazing study in managed decline

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

Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.

I honestly don't even care so much because I do everything on my phone these days but yes it has become apparent that Microsoft hates Office.

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.

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?

The only thing not slowing down is the speed of enshittification at Microslop.

enshitification

> 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.

Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.