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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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