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kmoorevs wrote: Continue in the Browser
I've already expressed several times my profound disdain to the guys who came up with the idea that a browser can be used for something else than browsing the Internet.
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There is one major reason: Browsers tend to have the highest update frequency of all your software. FOSS communities come up with new image, audio and video formats so frequently that the only presentation software able to keep up with all the new formats are the browsers.
20-30 years ago, before MP3 and its successors became dominant, lots of programmers, with highly varying real understanding of audio, tried their hand in making their own compressors. It was like every second sound clip you downloaded would require you to download a new (co)dec as well. I remember once counting some 30 different (co)decs (not counting alternate (co)decs for the same format on my PC. Some audio players would, when presented with a format for which it had no (co)dec would start an automatic search on the internet for one to download.
I don't think this is common nowadays - at least I see few references to where to download new codecs. But if you have an updated browser (and it is difficult to stop automatic browser updates!), you can be reasonably sure that it can handle the newest variants from the FOSS community. Often, you can use your browser to read/present the file in one format, and then save it in a more traditional format. (At least for photo formats - I am not sure of audio/video formats.)
I regularly use browsers for that purpose. Yes, I think it is silly, but the main silliness lies in the continuous stream of new media formats. Usually you can skip 4 out of every 5 new and revolutionary better formats (or new versions of old formats), and yet you may have problems with guessing if a sound/video has been compressed with the old or the new technology.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Enabling editing possibilities in browser is unsecure and can only be a crippled functionality due to performance.
MSOffice in a browser is a POS idea. But let's assume some people are fine with a POS toolchain, because from their perspective, it is manageable and they like to use slow and crippled functionalities - Fine for them. Then do not force ME to use this POS tool chain and give me the possibility to not have to click every freaking time on "I want to ignore your POS browser editing and use the tools I have been using for the last half century and which are better an doing your job than your POS version in the browser". I truly HATE UIs forcing things on me, this is not UX, this is not 2024.
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Browsers have come a long way from simple browsing. Netscape was probably the last one that had that as its end goal. I have been running all my email accounts in Chrome for years, and find it far superior to Outlook, Thunderbird etc.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: far superior to Outlook,
I disagree on this one, but this must truly be a matter of taste. I find online mail editors awful, even if they have improved a lot in the last decade. Especially gmail is for me totally unmanageable : as much as I like the Google environment, Gmail never made it to me, I must be to idiot to use it properly and understand the display logic.
A browser should do what its name says : browse, maybe enable enough server actions to allow simple transactions. Using them for much elaborated tasks is nonsense to me, as they are not designed for. I am under the impression that there is a run to misuse browsers as much as possible ! What has been showed as an advantage by op, that browsers are always up-to-date since you have no hand on updates, is a big config management leak from my point of view.
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Rage wrote: but this must truly be a matter of taste
Well of course it is, discussion like this are always subjective.
Rage wrote: A browser should do what its name says
The name has been a misnomer for years; browsers have been doing far more than simple browsing for a long time. whether you think that is a good or bad thing, is again, a matter of choice.
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I thought I was the only one who couldn't do squat with gmail--maybe I'm not incompetent after all. Luckily Thunderbird has been around for years.
FormerBIOSGuy
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Quite a lot of the bacon I've brought home over the last 25 years has been paid for by apps I've created that run in browsers, and the performance and feature gap between those and locally installed apps has narrowed to almost nothing. Most of my internet "browsing" is accessing server-based browser apps to do my banking, shopping, social interactions, etc. App maintenance is so much easier to all concerned when users don't need to continuously download and install updates.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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TNCaver wrote: Quite a lot of the bacon I've brought home over the last 25 years has been paid for by apps I've created that run in browsers
I never said it does not pay. But the fact it pays does not say it is good.
TNCaver wrote: banking, shopping, social interactions
These are trivial transactions with a server. Do you design 3D models in your browser ? Do you create pivot tables in your browser ? Do you write long reports with pictures in your browser ? No. Why ? Because they are not designed for it.
TNCaver wrote: App maintenance is so much easier to all concerned when users don't need to continuously download and install updates
Which lead to "lazy sw release" -> We do not need to deliver quality since we can update it anytime.
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Rage wrote: But the fact it pays does not say it is good.
And your opinion that it isn't good because it's a browser app is non sequitur.
Rage wrote: These are trivial transactions with a server.
But they are a helluvalot more complex than just "browsing the internet."
Rage wrote: Do you design 3D models in your browser ?
I haven't but there are some out there that do this very well.
Rage wrote: We do not need to deliver quality since we can update it anytime.
Another non-sequitur. What a silly claim. Where the app runs has nothing to do with its quality.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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Silver lining though... at least MS is forcing you to create accounts now to steal all your data. 
Jeremy Falcon
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"In order to play the game, one must have pieces on the board."
- Gary Wheeler on codeproject.com, 07-23-2024 1:36pm
Software Zen: delete this;
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I refuse the new Outlook. Don't know how bad it is on a Windows machine but on a Mac it is abysmal. How would a muckity-muck know if you were using the old UI verses the new UI anyway?
Yes, I saw he discovered it was Teams. Still my question stands.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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Progress involves making (sometimes unpleasant) compromises/learning/Adaption now and then. It has always been the same from W?->W2K->WXP->W7->W10->W11->W?XYZ
modified 23-Jul-24 14:42pm.
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My experience is that pretty much anything corporate must be destroyed. HR, CTO offices, most of Legal and CFO offices, half of the executive management...
Corporatum dicasteria delenda sunt!
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It's too bad Scott Adams got cancelled for speaking the truth about an incident. This would have been perfect fodder for Dilbert.
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Long time Outlook (new) user here. Yeah, it is simplified. But at least quick and it displays HTML mails and does not route you to IE 11 to show them.
- The folder list is not even alphabetically ordered but Favorites is your place to arrange
- Links: definitively working for me. Corporate IT thing?
- You can edit the link just like in for ex. Excel, select it and press the same button you have used to add it, the same edit box will appear pre-filled with previous data
- It is a Windows 8+ style modern application, it runs in the background. I get new mail notifications without running it, sometimes more than I would like to get. Search it in the applications and services list, click once, choose Special settings and will see it. If not, then Corporate IT thing?
All places backtranslated from Hungarian so maybe worded a bit different in the English Outlook/Windows settings.
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Peter Adam wrote: The folder list is not even alphabetically ordered but Favorites is your place to arrange
I shouldn't have to replicate my folders under Favorites.Peter Adam wrote: Links: definitively working for me. Corporate IT thing?
They're not smart enough. Besides, why would disabling editing links be an issue?
Software Zen: delete this;
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Outlook at it's **very best** (a long time ago) was a total disaster.
I refuse outright to use it.
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Not to worry. The new Teams sucks, too. No more Contacts list in the chat, the only choice is to have them ordered by the latest active one. Unless you go through the hassle of "pinning" them. Cartoonish emojis are another "feature". You'll love it. 
Da Bomb
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I used it for about 10 minutes and went back to the old version. I didn't like several of the features, including when you change the message sort, with a message selected, it would re-sort and go to the top message. Not very helpful if I sort by sender and was trying to group messages from 'Paul'.
I also don't need/want an email client that attempts to tell me important or unimportant. I can do that in about 3 seconds per email and I know I'm correct in my doing it.
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Gary Wheeler wrote: The actual executable can't be run via a shortcut in the Startup group,
I just had to check this out. I'm not sure why the Startup folder might be handled differently, but I just created a shortcut to the EXE on my Desktop folder, and double-clicking it started the app just fine. If shortcuts located in the Startup folder perform the same action, I would have to assume it would work.
(I have tons of stuff loaded right now and this is not a good time for me to log out/back in just to verify this)...
I found the path to the EXE by right-clicking on olk.exe in Task Manager's Details tab, and selecting Open File Location.
The EXE is in a folder that contains the version number in its path, so I would assume sooner or later the shortcut is gonna get broken, but that's an easy fix.
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dandy72 wrote: I found the path to the EXE by right-clicking on olk.exe in Task Manager
I didn't try that. Open File Location doesn't exist in the Start menu entry for it.
Part of my point here is that Teams has an easy option for having it auto-start. Outlook should have the same thing. Having to find the executable, create a shortcut to that executable, and then have to repair the shortcut after updates is cumbersome and sloppy.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: Open File Location doesn't exist in the Start menu entry for it.
Add the Command Line column in Task Manager's Details tab. It'll be shown there. Bonus: if it was started with command line args, you'll see them there too, which means you can add them also to your shortcut.
Gary Wheeler wrote: Part of my point here is that Teams has an easy option for having it auto-start. Outlook should have the same thing
And for the longest time, people were complaining about the opposite - all apps tried to auto-start, even though you didn't want them to, and the hunt was on to make them stop...
Personally (and ideally), I only reboot my system after Patch Tuesday, so clicking on the taskbar icon once a month to start Outlook is something I'll put up with.
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dandy72 wrote: I only reboot my system after Patch Tuesday
Unfortunately corporate IT reboots our machines at the drop of a hat. Any hat. Hats in Cleveland (we're in Dayton Ohio).
Between that and the fact that I do the installers for our product (which usually requires a reboot), it would be annoying.
Software Zen: delete this;
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