Posted by Adam-Hincu 10 hours ago
Where there any genuinely useful features Outlook 2016 had over 2010?
Just off the top of my head:
IFNA, FORMULATEXT, DAYS, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, XLOOKUP/XMATCH, FILTER, UNIQUE, LET, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER, LAMBDA, et al.
But my favorite improvement is the "don't intentionally corrupt CSVs" options found in Settings -> Data -> Automatic Data Conversion (hint: Disable everything). Only took them 30-years to add that. Absolutely absurd these are enabled by default still.
Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET. Still don't understand why we don't have local-only Python to replace VBA at all license levels (i.e. non-cloud).
It still butchers long strings of digits if they are more than around 12 and less than around 15 digits long, its very annoying still.
Also textjoin and textsplit and the whole spill functionality.
Reminds me of the old joke about it: How is Microsoft Excel like an Incel? Both think everything is a date.
>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'm curious how much of those 150 are things that can't be boiled down to 'text', since that should be roughly the same size as on completely un-bloated software. The database of emails, the plain text of said emails, and all the basic UI should all be nothing but text and take up next to nothing.
Images on the other hand. I'd imagine Outlook Classic hasn't been made with 1 MB PNGs for all their icons, so it's probably not that that's pulling the memory usage, although it's probably contributing. Meanwhile, New Outlook (New) probably didn't optimise a single thing, so it probably is using 1 MB icons, which then quickly piles up. Not to mention the whole webview rendering backend, since we apparently can't make anything without going through a few layers of abstraction first.
Rest of the people do not know the difference or know how to change out the software with better alternatives. Example, Firefox keeps loosing customers to Chrome and yet Firefox fully supports Manifest V2 with proper Ad-Block support, which increases computer security. Show these people an Ad heavy website with Chrome vs Firefox & U-Block Origin, this looks like magic to them.
Personally, you have to pay me to use Microsoft products. I have been game exclusively on Linux for nearly 10 years now. Before that, 5 years of dual booting just to game.
But seriously, can we please make desktop productivity apps not suck on windows? I started programming on windows, old school Win32 with a little MFC. Still have the super thick MFC book from MikeB somewhere in the closet. It was better than the alternatives at the time.
Now I look at the windows developer site and I can't even figure out what happened since I stopped Win32 programming at around 2004. It's a total train wreck of abandoned technology, each worse than the previous ones.
Office (and to some degree visual studio), used to be the lighthouse, best in breed application, often using api's that were not yet public and styles that were not yet adopted. I remember buying component libraries that emulated these to make better looking and performing apps.
I'd look at windows again if they would make apps not suck and be ones that the industry strives to emulate. Without that, Linux or Mac is just as good (actually better since they have decent userlands).
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?
Every time.
And then there's the fact that, if Teams wasn't already loaded, you can be up five minutes late for a meeting waiting for Teams to roll out of bed despite having clicked Join bang on meeting time.
I don't have the most up to date system at work, but it feels like 90s wait-computing.
Like, sending an empty folder to the bin:
Win 10 this afternoon took seconds to display a dialog box with no content, the a couple seconds to add a progressbar, then a second to add the cancel button, then multiple seconds to finish showing progress.
But at home a 1991s system with System 7 completes the same task instantly without needing a progressbar.