alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
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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.
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.
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/...
Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?
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).
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.
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?
As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”
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?
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...
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.
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]
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The funny thing is that the Outlook client for Mac is a native app and it's way better than the Windows client.
New Outlook doesn't even have feature parity with Outlook Classic.
2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Oh man! How do we ever get enough compute to run AI if AI-written apps end up eating it all?
Me: I'm tired of this, grandpa... Microsoft: Well that's too damn bad!
Anytime a relative installs a new machine I get the call "What is wrong with outlook?". It's always "new".
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.
Is anybody still using email in 2026?
Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
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.
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
Web apps are a scourge.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing not slowing down is the speed of enshittification at Microslop.
Everything this company touches is shit. Unbearable.
> 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.