Item — HN Reader

I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality.

Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook, which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Classic Outlook to feel old-fashioned and outdated and as result, we ended up losing some core features that made Outlook, Outlook. We lose: COM Add-ins and VBA Macros, MAPI Support, Word as Email Editor, .PST File Support.. to name a few..

This would be probably one of the reasons contributing to the Collapse of Civilization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317)

2 comments

Speaking of new outlook, has anyone else had search just...not work? I'll search for emails sent from myself, to myself (of which I know there are hundreds) and get 7 results. Same in the web app, but outlook classic works fine. Mind boggling

They probably reused their Windows search engine :)

I mean they need the resources to switch from native, to UWP, to web, and then start over again in 2 years. How do you think should they manage to fix such a unnecessary thing like search in the meantime?

But fear not! As we learnt from Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, in early 2026, 100% of the code will be created by GenAI. Finally we can have native apps with working core-functionality. Can't wait for it!

Search on Outlook is horrendous. Our company bought Copilot just so people can start searching their e-mails.

I wonder if it's intentional and making everyone get copilot is the goal

The old Outlook was way better. Every user in our org has been complaining about this.

I actually like the new one, but it’s missing tasks so had to stick with legacy.