[vladvasiliu]

> Cloud-first, in all the wrong ways. It's supposed to be a local app..

It's actually a really weird app. I have a windows PC I sometimes use at work, loaded with all the corporate crap, among which a full up-to-date installation of office 365. Since this machine isn't mission-critical, I sometimes like to check "what's new", so I've switched to the "new outlook".

Yesterday I got an email from someone with an attached Word doc. Usually, I just read those inside outlook, since I only need to skim them at best.

But this time, I clicked "open in word". The thing took ages. First it uploaded the doc somewhere on onedrive (didn't ask me anything). That took a good few seconds. Then it proceeded to open a browser window with a spinny thing doing whatever it is ms products do when they have you waiting around for no apparent reason. Then it finally opened the doc in word online. All the while having a perfectly good copy of word sitting on the same nvme drive as the freakin' attachment.

Now, this computer isn't the latest thousand core threadripper or nothing, but it was still the longest I've ever had to wait around for a 2 page text-only word doc to open.

[mattgreenrocks]

New Outlook, which forgot to notify me that I had a meeting coming up despite having notifications set for it.

In a corporate office environment, that’s one of its two jobs.

[PascLeRasc]

New Outlook also fails at its second job for me, it won’t fetch email unless it’s the active window.

[vladvasiliu]

I wonder if this related to the Edge feature of "freezing" tabs, since New Outlook is clearly an Electron-like contraption, but I think they're supposed to use the Edge Web Views instead of shipping their own electron runtime.

At least it doesn't crash. At one point, it used to just die on me. They've also fixed the window decorations and ramdom icons in the left toolbar, which used to become weird on mouse over.

There's also something else odd going on with the app. When I start it from the start menu, there's a very long lag between my pushing enter and the start menu going away. This happens every time I start outlook after a fresh boot, but doesn't happen with other shitty apps, like New Teams. For those, it disappears right away, even though the app doesn't start up instantly. It doesn't matter the order in which I start them, nor if I only start Outlook after the machine has been running for a while.

[emeril]

pro-tip - just try to use an old version of outlook that's still functional like outlook 2010 and just set autoarchive to run pretty often so the ost doesn't get too big and make the thing crawl...

much better than nuOutlook

though often hard in most corporate environments...

that said, if I were in a more buttoned up IT environment, I'd just use the web client as it's sadly faster than the desktop client these days

I'd use the web client now except the version my company has is pretty bad and old still...

[vladvasiliu]

> that said, if I were in a more buttoned up IT environment, I'd just use the web client as it's sadly faster than the desktop client these days

I'm not in a "buttoned up IT environment", but I still prefer the web client. It actually works great on Firefox on Linux and is way snappier than local outlook ever felt.

[jknutson]

I might be out of touch with security nowadays, but could there be a reasonable explanation on Microsoft’s part here in that they wanted to try and help prevent the dime-a-dozen malicious attachment attacks that we’ve all heard about? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no stranger to Microsoft’s strategies— opt-out telemetry, Cortana, bing search in the system tray, etc. It’s not all fueled by just this one particular propriety that I brought up, I know it’s also got a lot to do with their way of pushing their products onto their users with annoying opt-out (at best) features that everyone might not want, that serve to push whatever it is they’re trying to sell to their users.

Point is, at least this specific gripe, for what it’s worth I can see some valid justification for. And if this is new behavior that they intend to stick with, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did improve it over time (although I also wouldn’t be surprised if it stayed as much of an annoyance as you described— bing search in windows remains an unchecked crime against humanity to this very day!)