Weirdly enough it seems like Outlook on the web is somehow faster than the Windows version. It might be because lots of email uses HTML and Outlook is using an ancient version of HTML. I am very impressed with developers who can make things consistent in Outlook as well as actual browsers.
Outlook web is slow as molasses. In the desktop is literally unusable for me (It never opens my account). Both things were superior experiences in 1999.
Outlook on the web seems to be getting most of the development effort, in part because supposedly its parts are increasingly shared with Windows Mail/Calendar (aka "Mobile Outlook") through supposedly React Native, but also in part because apparently that's just where most users use Outlook in 2021 (even in many MS365 shops, supposedly, there are a bunch of companies that prefer the web app).
There have been a bunch of interesting rumors that Microsoft is planning to hollow out the insides of Outlook Desktop (anything that isn't nailed down to big corporate contracts and their extensions), and directly replace those guts with Web Outlook via React Native or something like it.
I think at this point they could hollow out Outlook and replace it with a guy who draws the interface on a whiteboard and then sends me a photo of it. That might have similar round-trip latency. /s
Really, a web app wrapped in a desktop app would be fine if it could perform better. I don't even need good, just better.
