I’m still bitter about Mail & Calendar. It worked wonderfully, but of course they decided to discontinue it.
Wait, which Outlook? Outlook, Outlook (New), Outlook (Old), Outlook (beta), Outlook (omega)?
I just use the web one because I can’t be bothered trying to work out which of the 11 outlooks I actually want.
I have two Outlooks and neither of them work
Outlook Copilot Copilot
Copilot copilot plus
… for Outlook
And Knuckles
We have outlook classic at work, and that shit takes a solid 5 mins to actually load up my inbox enough to become functional.
Outlook has always been shit, the new AI slop is just fuel on the fire.
my work computer runs linux, so only o365 webmail outlook, and it’s… somewhat functional but the damn ai creeps in on every occasion.
automagic autocorrect that can’t decide if I’m typing english, finnish, or mix of both when the occasion needs it? Nah, autocorrect it wrong 100% of the time. But I did find a toggle for it after few weeks.
the apps menu to open eg. teams when needed? only options are copilot and “other apps” - which is also copilot.
not that I need teams that often, but wtf. I started using a bookmark rather than navigating the menus.
Oh, I love “other apps”. My Teams once decided that obscure features like chats and calls belong in there.
Yes, Teams. Put your core functionality out of sight. That’s exactly what I wanted.
I think there’s an entire department within Microsoft dedicated to just making teams as bad as possible. Is lacks features that other chat apps have had for over a decade that teams doesn’t support.
Heck, I’d love it if they added a toggle to not hard-pan all audio to the left channel and drop all input from my microphone until I restart Teams and log in again despite having logged in ten minutes ago.
My department has a service that is abbreviated to PM. Since our organization uses Google for mail, I often have to battle with automagic corrections to every use of PM as a noun to “the PM”.
Check the plugins list. Some companies have a few.
Then you have slow* computers, or an inbox of 50GB+ of emails over the last decade. I’ve got about 20k (maybe around 15GB) email after archiving a bunch of data to a .PST, and it’s much snapper.
I have to hang onto my old emails, but I’ll archive to a local file since I don’t need them all the time. I do it by every year, it’s very helpful, makes Outlook Classic very fast again. The nice thing is the archives go into the Documents which is then backed up through OneDrive.
Then you have show computers
Definitely.
or an inbox of 50GB+ of emails over the last decade.
I didn’t think so? I do a mass delete every now and then, but there always seems to me more that it’s not displaying. /shrug
Ohhh damn it! Slow** computers smh…
Microsoft is such garbage these days. My coworkers and I are constantly complaining about all of our Office software that doesn’t function the way it used to and instead only makes our jobs more difficult.
If only managers/IT could see how amazing Linux is.
The productivity gains I’d have from the speed of Linux on my work machine would be noticeable. Plus my mood would greatly improve.
Windows (especially slop 11) cannot handle how much I do at once. My brain is faster than the computer now 😅
I keep seeing people say this and it’s like have you actually ever used Linux in a production environment?
Linux is great on single computers systems and of course on servers but trying to manage hundreds of desktops, laptops, iPhones, iPads, random Androids you have to support because C suit, and PoS till systems that run on modified Windows XP and you realise you can’t just switch everything over to Linux.
Because Linux doesn’t have a clue how to support any of that. As much as Windows is trash and I hate it, there is no replacement for Active Directory or SCCM, even Apple don’t have such a robust support system.
The average office worker cannot differentiate between a file explorer and a web browser. I wish corporate jobs could switch to Linux over Microsoft.
You are correct. Explaining our server vs onedrive/teams/SharePoint is a losing battle with most of their eyes glazing over if you try to explain.
Oh that’s alright, everyone in my office just sticks everything in SharePoint. It’s got up to 13 terabytes now and they’re already whining that that’s not enough. I think they’re hosting 4K blu-ray rips in there.
Nah, it’s probably a <1mb spreadsheet that’s updated daily by multiple people that has never had version control settings enabled and it’s taking up taking up 10tb.
SharePoint: this is the way.
Oooh very accurate. There is some “mandatory” signing sheet for reading the monthly safety info but anyone can edit it and most people are incompetent with computers. Took only 2 months for my name to get deleted by somebody and I just…never signed it again. Nobody noticed.
I have no idea how IT is taught in schools these days, but there should be a lesson somewhere entitled Excel is not a database, don’t use it as a database.
I switched to Linux a few weeks ago on my work laptop. My colleagues are amazed at how fast my Gradle builds are finished. My mood also improved by a lot!
I’m so jealous.
Thats great! I’m amazed at companies that would allow this. I cannot imagine ours doing it. Our IT dept hardly knows what Linux even is.
We allow people to have Linux devices or Macs if they want them but they are not our responsibility to fix if they break. If your laptop won’t connect to the shared drive because it doesn’t support FAT32 or something, that’s your problem to fix.
In the past it would have at least been best endeavours to try and get everything up and running again but the company’s grown too much and the IT department hasn’t so I haven’t got time to do anything that isn’t strictly speaking my job.
People are always complaining about the IT department but generally the issue is that the IT department is under funded and understaffed.
Yeah if you think the guest support for the fs on the physical drive is relevant for a network share you wouldn’t be really useful.
My Gradle could have been even slower?
God, I wish I could upgrade the work computer to Linux. Unfortunately, we need software that is Windows only, and having to virtualize it counterats too many of the benefits
Our office is slowly making the transition. Its been fantastic slowly getting rid of IIS, windows boxes, etc…
What are they transitioning to? It seems difficult to fully escape MicroSlop in the office environment and get everyone onboard, especially when my IT group double checks everything they do with CoPilot first. 😡
Gross.
Thankfully our management is wary of slop bots (though they allow use of it in scenarios where you aren’t inputting data. Which is like every scenario soo, its useless) This however upsets the Young’s that think everything should be done with slopbots (spoiler, their work is shit)
They’ve been garbage since vista.
Slopslopslopslop
The only solution, as you might’ve guessed, is the move to WinUI. We already reported that Microsoft is now fully committed to WinUI, with Rudy Huyn preparing a team to make native Windows apps, and so we may see a native Outlook too…
One can dream. The prevalence of web apps pretending to be native apps is unfortunate. Just because your devs “know” JavaScript doesn’t mean it is a good language.
So we are going ful circle back to native code, that has worked much faster for decades.
Web technologies on desktop applications was always a bad idea.
Just you wait until they start using webassembly to make native apps run
and tout it as an advantage! In reality it’s only more convenient for the dev, and just uses up more resources and have more moving parts on the client side
It’s a feature.
Try fastmail for how to build an instant Web interface that is just ridiculously fast. Everything is instant, it has offline support, email address aliases… I dont know. Couldn’t be happier. I literally have nothing to complain about at all.
Except yes, it’s part of the five eyes countries, which means every email is likely also in nsa datacenters. I dont like that, and would prefer it not to.
Good. I want all of the bloated software on my work machine. Whoever uses outlook on their personal device is making a very bad choice.
Slopware
Gotta load up all that spyware first.
This post took more ten 10 seconds to load the comments, but im okay with that. Fuck outlook anyways
Outlook classic loads instantly? No that’s a lie. It’s never loaded instantly.
Modern Outlook isn’t great but it’s a leap forward. It’s also browser based, which is good for alternative OS folks.
If only we had the technology that would allow us to compile software into an intermediate language and provide a runtime for a multitude of operating systems, instead of running everything in a fucking browser. That would be so cool, that way a text editor would not need 2 Gigs of RAM. And maybe outlook would not take ages to load
We could name the technology .net or something. Or maybe name it after a coffee bean.
Making their email client an enhanced version of their web client has its drawbacks but it makes development a lot easier.
If only they had enough money to fund the development of both a native and a web version
Outlook used to download emails to a local folder. Opening email was literally as fast as your computer’s HD read speed.
That is no longer true.
Also, no one is going to use microslop products on alternative OS. That’s an insane take.
Microsoft has even more market share on MacOS for office suite than it does on Windows.
Modern outlook downloads messages too, maybe you haven’t used it.
Many companies won’t care about end user os but are deep into the m365 ecosystem.
Opening an email via the web can never be as fast as opening one via a local cache.
Also, taking more than 10 seconds to open an email is just insane on its own.
Old outlook took forever to launch, and would sometimes hang for no god damn reason, but at least it would somewhat instantly open an email.
New browser based, slop injected outlook opens moderately quickly, but still hangs for no god damn reason and can’t open an email from notification in less than 10 seconds.
If not for vendor lock in and paid(?) shills, no one would ever use that garbage.
Maybe you don’t use it? It works fine, it’s fast and caches messages/content locally.
Outlook Classic does that, but Outlook Classic is going away in favor of a web browser pulling up outlook.com
That’s what this whole article is about. The fact that under new outlook, clicking on a notification will take however long it takes, 10-seconds in the article itself. And from what they said, they did the tests repeatedly.
Because it’s a not a mail client, it’s a web app, and those are slow.
I use modern outlook daily. It’s not any slower than classic, especially when classic has any addins.
In fact it’s faster to open.
It’s better on your cpu/battery.
If you keep all of your email in your inbox like a lot of Outlook users do, it’s much faster to switch between folders and search.
Modern doesn’t fall apart when using shared mailboxes or archive mailbox like Classic does.
It’s awful at public folders.
It’s not great at browsing (not searching) for older messages as they load dynamically as you scroll after about the 3rd week.
I’m thankful it exists since I’m using Linux, but I use it as little as possible of course.
