Back in April (2016) I posted a quick rant about Yahoo! changing its Sign in page to a two-stage affair, affecting Flickr also. At this time Outlook (formerly Hotmail) had also changed its Sign in page; it was still a single ‘click to Sign in’ process but the E-mail address box had lost its ability to remember my e-mail address, meaning I have to type it in every time. Now Outlook has joined Yahoo! in turning its Sign in process into a two-stage annoyance where you have to put in your E-mail address and click Next before you can put in your password before finally signing in. Yay.
I still wonder what benefit this is. Perhaps there’s a security one whereby bots don’t find it so easy to auto log-in. Perhaps it is one of these things that benefit tablet users but thwart the rest of us (stragglers) still using proper computers. Who knows really; a little notice on the page acknowledging the change with a “Click here to find out more” would be nice, but we’re just the muggles users after all.
I’ll also take this opportunity to comment on how sluggish Outlook/Hotmail login has been since the earlier changes; it seems, at least on first loading my Inbox, I have to wait for the advert on the right to show before I can open an E-mail, if I click any sooner then the E-mail tends to open up blank, for an eternity for at least a good few seconds.