Microsoft’s Outlook for Home windows has a notification downside that’s exhausting to disregard. Clicking a Home windows 11 notification for a brand new e mail is meant to take you straight to that message. As an alternative, the brand new Outlook makes you wait, and the numbers are embarrassing.
Home windows 11 ships with two variations of Outlook. There may be Outlook Traditional, the long-running Win32 desktop app constructed for energy customers, and there may be the new Outlook, which Microsoft is pushing as the way forward for e mail on Home windows. The newer one is constructed on WebView2 and is, in essence, a browser window that hundreds Outlook.com. You probably have ever used each facet by facet, you already know which one feels quicker and which one doesn’t.
Outlook has had an advanced repute for years. The unique Win32 app turned notorious for being bloated and troublesome to configure. Microsoft’s reply was to ditch native code and rebuild from the online up. The end result, referred to as the brand new Outlook, changed the light-weight UWP Mail and Calendar apps that some Home windows customers had grown used to. Home windows Newest reported again in 2023 how customers protested when Microsoft introduced plans to retire these UWP apps in favor of an internet wrapper. The corporate pushed forward anyway, and by late 2024, the Mail and Calendar apps had been formally shut down.
Microsoft has additionally been pushing the brand new Outlook at enterprises, although it postponed the pressured opt-out deadline to March 2027 from the initially deliberate April 2026. A delay of a full yr exhibits that even Microsoft is aware of the app just isn’t absolutely prepared for each workload. New Outlook has improved in actual methods since launch, however the efficiency story continues to be a combined one, and nowhere is that extra obvious than in the way it handles notifications.
New Outlook takes 10 seconds to go from notification to the respective mail
Earlier than attending to the irritating half, credit score the place it’s due, New Outlook was once noticeably gradual to launch from scratch, however not anymore.
Outlook (basic) vs New Outlook:
New Outlook now opens virtually as quick as Outlook Traditional, which continues to be barely faster of the 2. However I’d say each are neck and neck, no less than in terms of opening speeds.
Nevertheless, when a brand new e mail arrives in Home windows 11, a notification banner seems on the backside proper of your display, and that’s the place the issue begins. Clicking that banner, or from the Notification Middle, is meant to take you on to the e-mail that triggered it.
With Outlook Traditional, it opens that particular e mail virtually immediately.
With the new Outlook, clicking the notification opens the app, hundreds the total inbox, after which takes round 10 seconds earlier than the precise e mail from the notification exhibits up on display.
What makes this much more absurd is that when you ignore the notification banner and as a substitute open Outlook instantly from the Begin menu, you will discover and click on the brand new e mail from inside the app and be executed with it, all earlier than the notification banner even disappears from the display.
5 seconds to open Outlook and click on an e mail manually. Ten seconds wait time to see that very same e mail if we click on the notification instantly. That is ridiculous, even for Microsoft.
And, because it seems, this isn’t an issue Microsoft can simply repair with an app replace.
Outlook is predicated on WebView2, and like all internet apps, it’s gradual
New Outlook is constructed on Microsoft Edge’s WebView2 runtime, which is a Chromium-based rendering engine. Each time you work together with the app, together with clicking a notification, a browser-like course of chain has to do the work. The app has to initialize or resume its internet layer, authenticate, load the related mail thread, and render it, all by means of that internet engine.
As Home windows Newest reported in December 2025, Microsoft acknowledged this slowness and was testing a brand new API referred to as “Delayed Message Timing” to assist diagnose efficiency points in WebView2 apps. Nevertheless, we haven’t seen any use of that API whereas clicking Outlook notifications.
New Outlook runs as 10 separate processes in Process Supervisor, in comparison with Outlook Traditional, which runs as a single compact course of. The record inside the brand new Outlook consists of WebView2 Supervisor, a number of WebView2 Utility processes, a WebView2 GPU Course of, a WebView2 Service Employee, and extra. Every of these is basically a browser part. All of them devour reminiscence individually, and so they all take time to renew from a suspended state once you click on a notification.
Talking of reminiscence, the brand new Outlook makes use of between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM whereas idle, with particular person classes various primarily based on mailbox measurement. Outlook Traditional, doing the identical job, makes use of round 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold distinction.
As for CPU, new Outlook makes use of round 4% at idle whereas Outlook Traditional makes use of lower than 1%. These numbers are from my very own measurements utilizing Process Supervisor with each apps open concurrently.
In fact, these points are frequent to all internet apps. As we reported, WhatsApp now consumes 1.2 GB of RAM doing nothing after Meta changed its native WinUI app with a WebView2 wrapper.
Microsoft has been conscious of the offline and efficiency limitations of latest Outlook for a while. The corporate spent a lot of 2024 attempting to make the app work correctly with out an web connection, one thing Outlook Traditional handles natively by caching mail domestically. An online app, by design, is all the time reaching out to a server.
New Outlook is bettering, however the hole with Traditional isn’t closing anytime quickly
In equity, the brand new Outlook has come a good distance since its rocky debut. The March 2026 replace added higher folder search choices and improved shared mailbox entry, two areas the place the app lagged behind Traditional for a very long time. The Could 2026 replace introduced automapped calendar help, so switching from Traditional to new Outlook not drops your shared calendars. Teammate calendars now present up robotically within the navigation pane.
Extra lately, Microsoft confirmed a June 2026 replace with 5 notable additions, together with an all-accounts inbox view (additionally referred to as Unified Inbox) arriving in August 2026, improved mail merge, and expanded .PST help. The .PST import replace in July 2026 will let customers herald calendar gadgets and contacts from native archive information, which was a long-standing ache level for anybody switching from Traditional.
The push to get individuals to change is getting louder too. Microsoft listed 15 productiveness options in early June 2026 as causes to make the transfer from Traditional. The record consists of offline entry, richer Copilot integration, quicker search, improved calendar controls, and extra. A lot of these options are issues Traditional customers have had for years, which makes the framing a bit odd, however the path is evident. Microsoft needs new Outlook to turn out to be the default expertise for everybody.
We had been additionally instructed in late 2025 {that a} calendar agenda view within the Notification Middle was coming, bringing again a Home windows 10 function that went lacking with Home windows 11. The agenda view, when it arrives, will even be powered by WebView2. Whether or not it introduces comparable delays stays to be seen.
An online app can not repair efficiency points
Microsoft celebrated development for brand new Outlook in 2024, however a good portion of that development got here from pressured migration. Folks didn’t select the online app as a result of it was quicker. They had been moved to it as a result of the apps they beforehand used (Mail + Calendar) had been shut down.
New Outlook opening quick from the Begin menu is an actual enchancment. The work being executed on new options exhibits that Microsoft is listening to complaints. However till the notification expertise matches what Outlook Traditional has been doing with out difficulty for years, the brand new Outlook continues to be working round a basic constraint imposed by the WebView2 structure.
The one resolution, as you would possibly’ve guessed, is the transfer to WinUI. We already reported that Microsoft is now absolutely dedicated to WinUI, with Rudy Huyn making ready a group to make native Home windows apps, and so we might even see a local Outlook too…
For now, if quick notification dealing with is vital to your workflow, Outlook Traditional is the extra dependable alternative. Traditional Outlook continues to be obtainable to obtain and is supported till April 2029. The brand new Outlook will preserve bettering, however a few of its limitations are baked into how it’s constructed, and people are tougher to repair with a function replace.