108 pointsby Adam-Hincu2 hours ago22 comments
  • patatesan hour ago
    > 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.

    • olexan hour ago
      The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.
      • robertlagrant41 minutes ago
        You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
        • sgt16 minutes ago
          That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.

          It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.

      • notwhereyouare40 minutes ago
        it really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day
    • thinkingtoilet2 minutes ago
      It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.
    • archildress33 minutes ago
      Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.
      • delusional28 minutes ago
        It is. Classic outlook didn't intermingle ads into your inbox. That feature alone makes new outlook much better.

        Written on my windows phone 7 series 7

        - Satya Nadella

    • codeduck37 minutes ago
      It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.
  • m132an hour ago
    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.

  • netsharcan hour ago
    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...

    • beart37 minutes ago
      As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.

      The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.

    • chris_wota few seconds ago
      That's nothing. He have Surface Pro laptops, and of course it has Copilot built in. I tried to open an app by typing in a search. On versions without Copilot turned on, instantly finds the app. On a Surface Pro, takes a good 20-30 seconds for it even start the search.

      Complete rubbish. Not a single person in the organisation likes the new Outlook.

    • criddell8 minutes ago
      Sounds like something is wrong with your system.

      My work machine runs Windows 11 and it's fully up to date. Notepad starts pretty much instantly.

    • itopaloglu8340 minutes ago
      Microslop at its best.

      I’m struggling to understand what their end goal is. How much can you half ass everything until your entire company becomes just a nuisance.

      • LollipopYakuza3 minutes ago
        I have had the same thought for years. I guess their monopoly makes them able not to care about quality (and does not depend on it).

        A big decision maker, before signing a big contract, will look at the budget and won't care about how good is the UX.

  • nzoschke28 minutes ago
    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.

    • stackskipton2 minutes ago
      I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".

      Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.

  • nticompassan hour ago
    Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
    • marcosdumayan hour ago
      Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)
      • nticompassan hour ago
        Wait, which Copilot is this? :-P
        • Sharlin25 minutes ago
          It's Copilot all the way down.
  • zkmon17 minutes ago
    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.

  • fg13737 minutes ago
    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?

  • FinnKuhn40 minutes ago
    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...

  • Sharlin21 minutes ago
    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.
    • rcarmo10 minutes ago
      Where does it break nav? Honest question, because I have been living inside it for almost 7 years now and actually prefer it to any of the desktop clients (except on the Mac).
      • Sharlin7 minutes ago
        On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all the way back to the login page. The app also seems to use old-fashioned #anchor-based URLs rather than the navigation API.

        (Hilariously, I found a feedback link but it points to a 404.)

  • Adam-Hincu2 hours ago
    2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
  • DaedalusII29 minutes ago
    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

  • 1970-01-01an hour ago
    Peak Outlook was 2016, right before the 365 mess.
    • MichaelZuoan hour ago
      I heard excel guys say peak Excel was 2010.

      Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?

      • Yossarrian225 minutes ago
        You can take LET and LAMBDA from my cold dead hands
      • 1970-01-01an hour ago
        Mostly memory management and 64-bit support finally being on-par with the 32-bit versions, but it's hard to argue the nuance overall.
        • deburo23 minutes ago
          The switch to hardware-accelerated rendering was poor. It's still causing issues today. Is it the graphic drivers' fault or their poor implementation? Who knows, but they also disabled the switch that allowed to turn it off, which is just classic Microsoft being annoying.
      • airstrikean hour ago
        I'm an Excel guy and 2013 was an improvement over 2010 with very little to dislike.
      • j16sdizan hour ago
        XLOOKUP was introduced in 2019. I thought it was a great update
  • bogometeran hour ago
    Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
  • instakill34 minutes ago
    new Google homepage takes [many] seconds to do what classic Google did instantly
    • Ekaros32 minutes ago
      Same with Gmail. On decent desktop with multi-hundred megabit connection. Frankly just amazing how poor things have gotten.
  • sgt20 minutes ago
    Similar one about WhatsApp on Windows. What a shitshow.

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

  • SoKamil33 minutes ago
    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.

  • jasonvorhe12 minutes ago
    Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
  • stainablesteel27 minutes ago
    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

  • lenerdenator29 minutes ago
    Honestly, for most intents and purposes, we could have just stopped with Outlook 2010. I'd have paid $5/mo for security patches.
  • mc3242 minutes ago
    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?

    • InitialLastName16 minutes ago
      What I don't understand is why search is so broken.

      If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?

      Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.

  • knorkeran hour ago
    > 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.

    • sgt13 minutes ago
      Web apps tend to be a mixed bag. After a while they become slow because of dozens of async operations relying on network.

      That can be an issue for native apps too, but they tend to be designed in a local-first manner, which means that they'll always have a speed advantage, assuming your typical dev team.

    • itopaloglu8334 minutes ago
      Another way to say tenth of a second is 100,000,000 nanoseconds.

      We have 4GHz computers with 8-16 cores, and it takes 100,000,000 cycles to show the start menu?

      Edit: Corrected the scale factor.

      • xmddmx28 minutes ago
        Another way (which happens to be correct) to say tenth of a second is 100 000 000 (one hundred million) nanoseconds. You were off by a factor of 1000!
        • itopaloglu8317 minutes ago
          Yeah, I skipped microseconds entirely.
        • jiggawatts9 minutes ago
          Also, at a typical turbo speed of 5 GHz you get half a billion clock cycles and multiple instructions can be retired per clock for about one or two billion total in those 100ms.

          That’s about 1,000 instructions per pixel of the Start Menu!

    • AshamedCaptain38 minutes ago
      What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?
  • anthk2 hours ago
    Thank JS and Electron supporters for that.
    • j16sdizan hour ago
      npm love this comment