Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads Attention, Mac users who access Outlook with Safari: something's broken, and it's causing an empty TokenFactoryIFrame file to be downloaded every few seconds for as long as you remain there. Microsoft hasn't said what's causing the problem, though it did acknowledge the ongoing blunder in this support message-board thread on …
Most people use the default, unless and until it annoys them "too much"
On macOS there's the added thing that you're forced to use Safari on all your iOS devices, so there's a strong incentive to use Safari on your Mac as well so passwords sync and websites are broken in the same ways.
Safari used to perform reasonably well for me, but somewhere during the Big Sur point updates it started slowing down. On Monterey Safari can take 5-10 seconds (or more) to launch, and generally feels laggy in use. The usual suspects (cache/history/cookies, removing extensions) haven't made any difference.
MS Office app launch times have also gotten markedly longer over the same time frame, but those run fine (or at least, as well as they ever did) once they drag themselves off the ground.
What's odd is that most other first- and third-party apps I use regularly on the same machine (e.g. Firefox, Reaper & other music prod software, various image editors, etc.) have not exhibited any slowdown.
BitDefender solves the password sync issue admirably.
2015 Retina MBP, i7, 16GB RAM, SSD. Admittedly not Tim Apple's latest & greatest, but it runs most things just fine.
That’s not my experience. Admittedly, I haven’t tried it on a low end Intel Mac, but on a high end Intel Mac or Apple Silicon Safari really flies. I’ve found it to be the fastest browser - and Firefox to be the one that bogs down.
Perhaps this is a matter of pick the tool that works for you - and be glad that there’s a choice. On the Mac at least.
As for iOS and iPadOS, I do find it objectionable that only WebKit is available for rendering. I like WebKit, I probably wouldn’t use the alternatives, but I’d like to have the choice.
Webmail is great. I've got RoundCube running on my personal web server, connected to my personal MX, and it's really handy for when I can't use a device using client software of my own choosing.
If you mean that third party webmail should never be used, well, I wouldn't know. Could be.
-A.
outlook itself brings my Mac to a crawl, largely due to excessive memory use. owa on the other hand is well behaved, at least in chrome. not using o365 version, though.
but this is just my personal experience vs your unsubstantiated, general claim. can you explain why webmail is bad, but a dedicated client, likely using http under the covers, is good?
Webmail is annoying.
1. Most webmail systems, including MS, time you out relatively quickly. A mail client is live 24/7. Webmail with 2FA is a major pain to log into. One webmail system I must use logs out after 30 minutes of ‘inactivity’ and requires 2FA EVERY SINGLE TIME that I log in. For some reason I don’t log in very often. This means that email sits there for days/weeks until I get around to logging back in.
2. Every webmail system that I have tried allows only one account to be live at once. You must log out the live account before you can check mail in another. I have three Office Live accounts and used to have three Gmail accounts. All of them would be live in my mail clients, including Outlook and Apple Mail. I really hate logging out and logging back in, over and over and over. In theory I could have different accounts live in different browsers, but in fact trying that causes both MS and Google to get all paranoid; there’s a reason why I no longer have Gmail accounts.
3. Webmail makes it difficult to turn off HTML and pix and the like. My clients run with max security, including no HTML. They are far more secure than webmail.
4. Certain organizations insist on webmail and make it difficult to use a client. One organization that I must deal with insists that if I use a client, I must give the all kinds of power, including the ability to remote wipe the device. This ain’t ever happening. This means that I use their email quite rarely, because it’s a major pain to log into their webmail. (See point 1 above) I associate webmail with assholes, those idiots aren’t the only ones to have that attitude they’re just the only ones that I have to put up with.
Gmail fully supports multiple accounts open in the same session. Each account gets assigned an id so you end up with e.g.
gmail.com/u/0/....
gmail.com/u/1/...
etc, no conflicts there. No forced logging out either, log in once and that's it for months/years/till you clear cookies.
Interesting. I was never able to log into more than one account at a time without problems. And after some time usually 24 hours, unlike MS’s crap which was typically 30 minutes, I would get logged out and have to log back in.
That said, it’s been a while since I had a Gmail account. Google hated my using ‘less secure’ clients, such as Apple Mail and Outlook, and decided that they weren’t sure that I was me and locked one account. I promptly killed the others and went elsewhere.
I agree!
Webmail is an abomination which makes Chrome running on unpatched XP look secure...
Email should be accessed by a client program using either imap or pop3.
Email is an OFFLINE activity which only needs to connect to send or receive, how can that even work when in a web browser?
Very little is actually an offline activity these days. Checking the weather used to involve looking out of the window, but now you need to open an app which will download that information from the internet to tell you.
Email CAN be stored and accessed offline, if you choose, but can also be handled online. The two are not mutually exclusive, so if you happen to work in the offline mode most of the time but need to unexpectedly access your email from somewhere else, you can do that through webmail.
IMAP, by the way, generally involves an open connection to the server and thus should be considered 'online' in your diatribe. POP3 is essentially an obsolete protocol now (and thank $dog for that).
Personally, I use proper email clients most of the time but have (a self-maintained) webmail available for contingencies.
I dunno, I find that it's a fantastic diagnostic for people who think all I do is sit around and screw up random people's mailboxes and/or network accounts- I don't. (I offloaded that years ago to the provisioning group. :D )
support team: "[customer]'s client won't connect | doesnt want to behave! Did you guys screw up their account!?"
me: "I dunno, I'm pretty busy- can you get to [url of the webmail front end for exchange] and login there?"
support team: "Well, yeah and it works, but you guys did something!!!111oneoneone"
::sighs and remotely interrogates machine, then hands the a link to the word document on how to fix the problem that was written two years ago and is something the support team really should know about because this is the 88457521th time I've sent them the link to the document ::
Me: "Try that, and see if it works."
-twenty minutes later-
support team: "Hey, that fixed it. You should let the rest of the support team know about this document!"
Me: ::face plants keyboard hard enough to break it in half::
Looks like Pegasus Mail works in an MS/PC-DOS environment :-)
Of course, you could always go console-only with FreeBSD or Linux and have a wider choice of console based email clients :-)
IE3 also chewed up memory and tended to crash Windows somewhere around the twentieth web page (and that was on mid-1990's lightweight* web pages). We advised people to go back to using Netscape until we'd managed to upgrade everyone to Windows 95/8.
* in comparison with today's CDN/crap overladen stuff.
Well, I shall should stand by this, I'm the guy wrote that Fileformats handbook. The original manuscript and the first (German) copies are still standing within my bookshelf here in men offfice ;-). But it was a long time ago - last millenium - and isn't no more true ;-).
BTW: As I supposed, it was a (server side) Microsoft flaw with Safari/OWA - they have fixed it now (confirmed by German blog reader and a Microsoft forum moderator). See my addendum to:
https://borncity.com/win/2022/05/04/apple-safari-haben-ein-outlook-tokenfactoryiframe-problem-mai-2022/#comment-14814
Side note: The reason for the sentence "I've linked this article within my post in Microsoft Answers forum and asked the forum moderators to forward the issue to the responsible Microsoft product group – that's all I can do," is simple. I don't have the appropriate forum roles in Microsofts US forums (only on German MS Answers Windows forums) to reach the right guys directly.
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