This article will benefit any admin or user who recently experienced Outlook freezing or crashing issues while using Sidebar. This is most likely due to a known issue happening for all Office Web Add-ins after a recent update from Microsoft, for which Microsoft has suggested a workaround.
Microsoft recently updated the embedded browser for O365 add-ins. The browser Edge Webview is part of Outlook, and Cirrus Insight uses it to run the Sidebar. This browser is creating some memory leak issues that increase memory consumption beyond the limit Outlook has for add-ins, leading to freezing/crashing of Outlook. There are multiple bugs on it reported to Microsoft directly on their Github (Software development platform) project.
The workaround to keep the lagging/freezing from taking place is to 1) have the sidebar unpinned while in compose mode, and 2) end the “Desktop App Web Viewer” task in your Task Manager if you notice Outlook crashes. Watch this video on unpinning the sidebar.
Salesforce has an article that also explains why this behavior is taking place with Office Web Add-Ins, and provides more details on Microsoft’s recommended workaround to keep this issue from happening: Salesforce Outlook Integration - Outlook Desktop Client freezes due to memory leak”
To confirm that this is not an issue related to anything on the Cirrus Insight side, our Product Development team has reproduced the crashing issue with other web add-ins while having Cirrus Insight completely disabled. Our diagnosis is that Edge Webview suffers from random spikes in memory usage, which results in Outlook getting crashed.
Like a host of products in the Microsoft ecosystem, that rely on "Desktop App Web Viewer" to operate, Cirrus Insight is also waiting on a patch from Microsoft to fix this issue.
To help the situation in any way we can at our end, Cirrus Insight team has been deploying updates to improve overall performance and making our sidebar leaner. We have also worked on reducing our sidebar’s memory usage.
