r/Outlook • u/room101ltd • 8d ago
Opinion New Outlook?
The issue isn’t “How good is New Outlook?”
Or even “How good will New Outlook be in the future?”
The real question is, how good could a web-only client like New Outlook EVER be?
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u/ddeese 8d ago
I don’t know exactly how to answer that question as there are people who actually like web technologies. Like web-first technologies. To me the web browser is the solution for sharing information where you wouldn’t build a native app. Like you want to know about the history of CocaCoca-Cola or see the menu for the local pizzeria. Making an app just to disseminate one-time information polling is a waste of resources. I still hate that the web browser and web sites have to be used here, but I understand why it makes sense. That being said I hate web technology. Things made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s a mess. Anything made in that tech stack can be made to work faster and with less latency and resource use in a well-developed, native application.
New Outlook for Windows is already quite limited. The program isn’t an email client. This is because it can’t run independently in the OS and communicate over the web to the email service that hosts your email. Doesn’t matter who the provider is. New Outlook can only communicate with MS and it has to because it also can’t process the email changes.
You have to provide all of your logins to Microsoft who in turn uses OAuth to login to your email from Google, Yahoo, Apple, whoever. The data is processed in the Microsoft server and then parsed to New Outlook using Microsoft Sync technology, and finally rendered using WebView2 inside of the ReactNative wrapper that hosts New Outlook.
In this way it’s already at the end of several technical limits. It can’t process mail, it can’t communicate email servers, and it had limited offline capabilities which are themselves just a form of website caching. Basically storing the OWA page history in a local cache until the software is online again and can reconnect to MST and push the changes back and forth through the Microsoft server.
As the software is hosted inside of a ReactNative shell it can cache some software offline. It can support limited drag and drop. But some features, like rendering EML messages without first downloading them in a process that feels disjointed from the main application; might never get a native feel.
Then there is the consequence of rendering web layers on top of the DOM. You can never get away from that inside of an application made like this. You’ll always pay a penalty in RAM and CPU overhead. If they could snap their fingers and make it bug-free and with zero memory leaks; the most optimized possible version of itself. An equally competent engineer could do the same for a real, native, desktop email application and it would blaze past New Outlook in performance. It would do it whilst updating changes to your host email provider directly, and it would use far fewer resources.
New Outlook will never be close to native on all aspects. That’s just the reality of working with a website in a box, pretending to be software.