This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I am growing very concerned with what it means that all of these large tech companies are willing to burn consumer good-will by making these wildly unpopular and barely justified decisions. Seems like each of the top 20 companies on the NASDAQ have made some kind of crazy unpopular change to their service in the last 6 months.
Fingers crossed that these changes will spur more people to invest into switching to open sourced software options.
User-hostile choices left and right
I use the Mail app on Windows to connect to my self-hosted email. On Outlook PWA, if you don't have an account on Outlook or Gmail then you're out of luck. If the switch actually happens, I'll have to start using Thunderbird as my main app - which still doesn't quite integrate with Windows on boot.
Not even Outlook proper integrates with windows on boot, which is nuts.
So. We went from Outlook Express to Windows Mail back to Outlook?! Make up your damn mind, Microsoft
It’s called “Innovation” /s
@Brkdncr@kbin.social (sorry, can't reply directly for some reason?)
Its a much better app.
That should be up to each user to decide but as always Mircrosoft knows better than you what's best for you. This "new Outlook" is actually a web-wrapper from Outlook.com running in Edge - you will have to use Edge and you will have to be logged in to Microsoft account - this is most likely the reason why they're doing it.
It's a pwa, you can use any browser you want that supports pwa (which is, at least, all chromium based browsers).
I have Outlook PWA (via Chrome) and I don't have Edge installed.
you can use any browser you want that supports pwa
Currently.
I know the web based app require login to MS, always online, etc., but the current Mail & Calendar app is really really bad.
I hope they make the outlook notifications have the same buttons as the mail app. When I tried the outlook app last time the notifications didn't have an archive or delete button. For me that was the most frequently used button in the entire program.
As long as they don't force M365 accounts to switch, I'm ok. I prefer the native Outlook desktop app than the PWA.
As long as they don't force M365 accounts to switch, I'm ok. I prefer the native Outlook desktop app than the PWA.
For those wondering about their add-ins, Microsoft quote "To provide a more reliable and stable add-in experience, VSTO and COM add-ins aren't supported in the new Outlook on Windows. To ensure your add-in continues to work in the new Outlook on Windows, you must migrate your VSTO or COM add-in to an Outlook web add-in."
Looks like it might be a while until businesses move to this web based version then, as many rely on business extensions in Outlook.
And I decided to force my laptop to migrate to PopOS and I haven't looked back.
It is refreshing to have so much control and zero advertising in PopOS.
It is amazing that after I spend several thousand dollars on nice hardware... some creep in Redmond Satya Nadella thinks he owns it because I paid him 50 bucks for a Windows license. I thought I was buying software to use my PC, not granting him a lincese to bloat it and spy my every click. Hey creep, why is this shit pinging home every time I click something?
Why does OS start spazzing out when I block non essential pings?
Logging telemetry requests can be very, very enlightening. Both Microsoft and Apple are ridiculous for this... hence my migration off of both for personal use.
MS is doing the same to Outlook users too at some point. Its a much better app. Windows mail/calendar were an oddity. Remember outlook express?
An oddity that has been around for a while. It was a fairly simple client on Windows 10 too. We used to use it for my mum to access her Gmail as it was so simple.
Moving from a local client to a Web based client is all about moving windows and it's software to a cloud based service. For that to work all your data needs to be remote in the cloud too. This is about what is good for Microsoft, not it's users.
