[patates]

> 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.

[vladvasiliu]

IME running the new outlook in an actual web browser (through outlook.office.com) is waaay faster than the heavy (heh) client.

Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.

I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!

[noisy_boy]

That is terribly hobbled. Examples:

1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.

2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline. I am in many groups and sometimes just want to clean up my calendar without sending declines. Again, very much present in the native program.

No one expects genuine innovation from MS, but at least they could put some effort into feature parity. Too much to ask for in the days of Copilot I guess.

[vladvasiliu]

> 1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.

I'm not sure what you mean. I have rules running regularly to move messages around, delete messages older than X in some folders. It all runs fine. Maybe there are some other kinds of rules I'm not aware of? But I do remember that back when "old outlook" was still the main thing, I needed to be running for the rules to apply, which meant that interacting with a different client was always... funny.

> 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline

Could this be a config flag somewhere? I've just run a test and invited my MS account from a personal mailbox. On the event, once accepted, there are two separate actions: decline and delete. I've received the "accepted" mail, but haven't received anything after "deleting" the event.

[noisy_boy]

1. You can run selective rules, but when you have a whole bunch, running all is more sensible.

2. When you select a slot in the calendar screen and press delete, the only options you get are cancel and decline.

All this is applicable for the PWA. The native client works fine.

[vladvasiliu]

I don't understand what you mean by your first point.

The delete button I was talking about is in Outlook running in a browser: https://i.imgur.com/k4ejdw4.png

Pressing the delete key on my keyboard brings this up: https://i.imgur.com/SBVkpVf.png

Clicking delete doesn't send any notification to the other side, where this account still shows as having accepted the invite (the other side is a different Office 365 organization).

[noisy_boy]

That is interesting. I'm using the PWA on Linux - I can't share a screenshot but basically pressing the delete key shows two buttons: Cancel and Decline Event? - I don't get the Delete option like you do.

[blackoil]

> after a weekend reboot

Isn't new outlook lives in the cloud? So this shouldn't be a usecase.

[noisy_boy]

How is being in cloud relevant if you are rebooting weekly.

[antaviana]

Public Folders is what makes us stick with the old Outlook client. For 25 years Public Folder has been a simple drag and drop, hierarchical archive system for communications with clients and vendors at team level.

[codethief]

> Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too.

I haven't really been able to use outlook.office.com in anything but Edge, which on my Windows machine automatically authenticates with M365. In other browsers I regularly get stuck in an auth redirect loop between different Microsoft domains when I open the site. Sometimes it helps to clear all cookies and re-login (which is a real pain with 2FA and all) but it only ever helps once: If I close and re-open the site, I'll have to do it again.

How people voluntarily pay for this crap is beyond me. (In my case it's forced upon me by my client. On my own machines I switched to Linux in 2010 and never looked back.)

[Jcampuzano2]

Same experience when I worked somewhere using outlook.

I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.

[mystifyingpoi]

Same experience here. Web version works just fine.

[number6]

Even their Office Suite runs okay in the Web. For heavy lifting, like getting an md file into our Corporate Design, I still use libreoffice combned with our template.

[thewebguyd]

> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one

There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.

What more do you need out of email?

Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

[impendia]

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Is this strange?

I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.

This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

[esikich]

No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.

[rescbr]

I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.

[thewebguyd]

I mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time.

But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.

Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.

Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.

[tevrede]

Copilot search is great for searching SharePoint

[pm3003]

Not even counting Sharepoint syncs...

[9x39]

>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.

At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.

I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.

[int_19h]

I don't recall any kind of retention limits at Microsoft, at least not for engineers. My mail archives went all the way back to my hire date even 15 years later.

[annzabelle]

When I worked at Capital One there was a policy of automatically deleting everything that had not been subpoenaed as soon as it was legal to delete it. Usually 3 years or so. Retaining longer was viewed as creating legal risk for future lawsuits. They didn't want to leave evidence lying around if they could help it.

Edit: We were on GSuite.

[hdgvhicv]

My company moved to a 3 year retention for legal purposes a few years ago. Somewhat annoying from a nostalgia point of view when I’d get mails pop up from 2095, but everything I need has been in jiras for the last 10 years.

[KetoManx64]

Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.

Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.

[emeril]

so true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically

[jen20]

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Email the protocol has this built in.

> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.

[tracker1]

I don't know about that... unless a good open-source option comes out for corporate email that matches what Outlook/Exchange/M365 offers for calendars and scheduling.

That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well.

In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.

[jen20]

Google seems most likely to capitalize. GSuite is standard practice even among many large companies provided they were founded in the past ~15 years and aren't on the Microsoft teat. Their search is also _so much_ better than Outlook that it's even more useful as a forever-store.

[tracker1]

I'm not disagreeing with the search aspect.. I will say that GSuite still doesn't do as well for calendar/scheduling integrations, or messaging beyond email for that matter... it used to, IMO, be as good for interactive messages before they nuked Hangouts in favor of whatever of the half dozen incompatible corp/public chat apps they've had along the way.

When Hangouts had integrated Google Voice and SMS in the app, imo, that was peak poweruser useful.

[CamperBob2]

Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.

[pishpash]

More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.

[x______________]

>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.

[theeyescanner]

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

[cagey]

The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.

[jburgess777]

I never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.

[jemmyw]

I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.

[tracker1]

Beyond just email, the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find. Google does pretty good, but it's still not nearly as good as the integrated corp experience with Outlook for scheduling... that said, I hate that I now get teams messages for meetings more than a business day in the future... I have outlook for that, I don't need it in teams... having a calendar and notifications in teams is fine, but limit notifications to things in the near future.

[jerlam]

Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".

There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.

A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.

[patates]

Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.

[warumdarum]

A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..

[olex]

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.

[robertlagrant]

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.

[sgt]

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.

[zaphar]

Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.

[sgt]

Generally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.

[cogman10]

Funnily, I'd say the reason web apps tend to be worse than native apps is because the web is so much more powerful and flexible.

For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.

Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.

[rho138]

The downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone?

Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.

[eyeris]

The Teams conferencing solution probably needs it.

It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.

[eyeris]

The teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and potentially suggests muting

[rho138]

Or just… mute the audio

[robertlagrant]

> 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.

Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.

[stephenhuey]

Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.

[nicoburns]

My main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.

[nmjenkins]

Offline support was added in August last year: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-works-offline/

[jonpurdy]

I literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline.

But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.

[nmjenkins]

(I work for Fastmail). That sounds odd – have you contacted our support team so we can look into it? https://www.fastmail.com/support/

[jonpurdy]

I didn't, but I'll do so now. I usually don't bother with support, because I forget that good companies like Fastmail actually have a competent support team.

[SCdF]

Not OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.

[everfrustrated]

The mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.

[LopovJack]

Even desktop app on Linux and a web app.

[zchrykng]

Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.

[Jakob]

I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.

[zchrykng]

I've heard good things about it, for sure, but I'd argue that it isn't really an Email client. It is a Gmail client as it doesn't work with anything else. Fastmail is in the same bucket, but it is part of my contention about there not being good Email apps generally.

[Barbing]

It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.

I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)

[JumpCrisscross]

> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email?

Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.

[Barbing]

Why does it seem to take so long to get & read one new email?

I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).

Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.

[zchrykng]

Mail.app's search is completely and utterly broken in my experience on Macs and on iPhones.

[JumpCrisscross]

Oh yeah. For search I open the browser, usually. But 99% of the time it works without taking a European Commission session to load.

[rstupek]

It looks like Apple is addressing this with the next release of macOS/iOS

[nunez]

iOS Mail app still undefeated 19 years later

[benhurmarcel]

It has its quirks. For example it can’t attach an image without inlining it. Or if the sender has several email addresses saved it can’t show which one sent you a particular email. And it can’t show you which of your email addresses received a given email.

[notwhereyouare]

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

[Twirrim]

Gmail used to offer a low bandwidth / performance webmail interface, that was essentially their original UI. Ran like greased lightning, used barely any memory. Emails loaded almost instantly.

It was nice while it lasted.

[nasretdinov]

Isn't it still the case then? I used the basic HTML version when I was working at Google to try to understand whether or not it was slow because of the (unoptimal) frontend or not (it was the backend that sometimes took >=600ms to load messages unfortunately, not the frontend).

[hn92726819]

Google killed basic HTML in Gmail a few years ago

[thinkingtoilet]

It's crystal clear Microsoft simply can't make good software at all anymore. Vendor lock and inertia are their biggest selling points.

[herbst]

When was the last time they did? Buying existing companies does not count

[hylaride]

Active Directory and MS SQL Server are both solid products, as is .NET. The windows NT kernel is very well thought out, too. The last iteration of windows phone was quite good, if too little too late.

Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.

[SoftTalker]

SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.

Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.

.NET is a copy of Java

NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.

[hylaride]

> SQL Server is a fork of Sybase. Not a MS invention.

It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.

>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.

So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).

> .NET is a copy of Java

That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.

> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.

Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.

---

I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...

[canucker2016]

For early history about Active Directory, you can't get much better than straight from the horse's mouth ( manager of the Exchange / Active Directory group ).

see https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/021-expand...

and

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/bonus-the-...

[SoftTalker]

I will say that in the era when they came out with AD they really took "enterprise configuration management" seriously and made Windows by far the best mainstream ecosystem to manage hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops.

[Rohansi]

> .NET is a copy of Java

A copy which has had value types (Java's ongoing Project Valhalla) from the start, and reified generics for as long as it had generics. They're quite different once you take a deeper look.

[cryo32]

NT, SQL, AD is good. It's the schizophrenic management in the last 20 years that has messed it up.

[rayiner]

Microsoft shows how long you can coast on some good decisions.

[rayiner]

Windows NT/2k?

[HumblyTossed]

Yeah, somehow we've lost lessons learned. Used to be, you knew it would take forever to display all of something, so you displayed what you could as you had time to render it. For instance a long report. As you render each page you would make that available to display instead of waiting for the entire 200 page report to render first. "Feeling" fast was often as good as "being" fast.

[someguyiguess]

No we still do that in web dev. This one was just a classic example of design by committee. Classic microslop

[ahartmetz]

The decision to use web technology and the decision to not give a shit about performance (or usability for that matter, unstyled text as buttons anyone?) are often made together, even though they are theoretically independent.

[archildress]

Sure seems like all this fancy Copilot coding help they have would've helped develop a better email client.

[sznio]

I think it really could. You can vibe-code efficient software, if you care.

Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.

[delusional]

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

[stackskipton]

Depending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.

[wolvoleo]

I do get ads. I constantly get notified about copilot features and whether I've used them 'enough'.

This is done by my employer but the "adoption" team at Microsoft provide the tools to do this monitoring and advertising, and they even provide the emails they send me verbatim. I have some stuff to do with the organisation around that. God I hate those guys, they are trained to be literal shills, corporate puppies. Completely brainwashed.

[soco]

The "new" Outlook is older than Copilot, so we can't blame the AI here. Don't take this as defense of the new Outlook - I hate it with the same passion.

[MBCook]

My company recently switched from Google Suite to Office 365.

Both are web apps.

It’s NIGHT AND DAY. Google did everything instantly. Outlook doesn’t.

This morning Outlook decided to spin for 30+ seconds (at which point I gave up) showing a folder. I get a modal pop-up telling me I have to “refresh” teams multiple times a day. Search always fails the first time. Always. Then it works. Some.

I agree. It’s not web tech. It’s MS not caring.

[efsavage]

Just last week I vibed an .eml viewer that uses WebView2 and can confirm that it's very quick when not encrusted with garbage.

https://github.com/efsavage/WinEML

Also a daily Fastmail user and it's as fast as any local mail client I've ever used.

[SomeUserName432]

I maintain a program using WebView2, it runs quite nicely.

It needs to render custom content, and the HTML renderer is much faster than I'm able to make it myself using the native API.

[codeduck]

It would be hilarious if it, like Teams, was backed by Sharepoint. It would also explain a lot about how terrible it is.

[Lammy]

The problem with web apps isn't that they're slow but that they enable the Room 641As of the world to spy on you, just by virtue of making network connections. Encryption doesn't even matter. Just behavior patterns are enough.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Wondering to what extent the new code has been AI-assisted.

[ericcholis]

I think that the usage of WebView2 is a moot point. It effectively is an Edge browser just the same as Edge itself. There may be other underlying issues, but I'd be shocked if WebView2 was to blame.

[reactordev]

Not to mention they puts ads in your email client regardless of whether you use office or not

[bob1029]

WebView2 can be a fantastic experience when the application is designed around it with intent. It can't be a technological afterthought. Taking an application that was designed for web and throwing it in a desktop shell is how you wind up with bad experiences. A hybrid of WebView2 and native elements seems to be the best approach. You can completely hide the browser startup delay with these techniques. The Discord engineers decided to just throw a splash screen in front and call it a day. You could do that too. It seems to fly.

[gigel82]

Until you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.

[canucker2016]

Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.

Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...

  I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...

  I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.

7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.

[mike_hearn]

Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because you can run all the Chrome components in-process, and in this case WebView2 is rendering trusted code written by Microsoft that isn't going to try and exploit the renderer (HTML email is very limited, doesn't support JS at all).

Processes in Windows are very expensive objects. They could probably reduce the overhead by allowing more customization of the Chrome codebase for this. Mojo abstractions service location.

[throw10920]

I have 16 GB of RAM on my laptop, and I'm told that's relatively little nowadays. Even after the OS's 2 GB cut, I can run 35 applications that use 400 MB each. I don't even have 35 applications that I care about. (and I'm certainly not going to want to run more than, say, three email clients)

RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).

(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)

[gigel82]

No quibble, but you'll have to pry classic Outlook from my cold, dead hands... :)

[throw10920]

Functionality and design are massively better than the new webapp - I just wish it responded with less than a 10s latency on my work machine...