We had the first rollout of that feature, where it was just "" and only on the web. It was weird, being able to "like" email messages but no one saw it unless they opened the web client.
But that's nothing compared to "the new Outlook"[1] being a webview around the Outlook.com UI library. It looks really nice in concepts but once installed it just feels like a browser in a frame: there's a window-sized splash screen, the fonts are "browser-y" (i.e.: wrong smoothing compared to Office), controls "feel" web, etc. I usually like Office Insider but once that rolled out I immediately reverted.
I would be shocked if the new Outlook was Electron and not WebView2. Is there any confirmation on that or is Electron the new "Rollerblade" and "Band-aid" for wrappers?
Teams is just a an Electron (AKA Chrome shit-client) program. So nothing can be done, unless they want to re-write the program from scratch. I'm not saying the current situation is acceptable, its not. But when you choose Electron, you more or less doom your product to having awful performance forever.
Well, that's one very opinionated take.
Yes, it's still web-based, but the parent's point is that it uses the WebView2 that comes with Windows instead of maintaining and shipping a separate Electron instance. That ought to be a net positive in any case.
OK, so Microsoft copy pasted the Chromium codebase, made some minor changes, built it, then include that build with Windows.
How is that any better than the current situation? Its actually worse, since now that version will get old quite fast, unless Microsoft decides to also do forced updates like Google does.
> How is that any better than the current situation?
The main benefits are that the apps should be faster, smaller, and use less resources as they don't include the whole of Electron (Chrome) with each one. So ideally massively less resource usage as so much is shared.
Running VS Code and Teams at the same time, for instance, would ideally use around half of the resources (a naive guess but you see the point).
As you allude to, though, it relies on MS keeping it updated but I would hope they take that seriously as if it takes off then one late update leaves multiple apps vulnerable. It remains to be seen.
I've been using it on and off since the 90's and it feels like it gets worse every year, the current iteration is barely usable.