How to get the new Outlook.com design right now

Microsoft’s Outlook.com is getting a major makeover. The company announced a new Outlook.com beta program yesterday, which comes with a brand-new design, and some intelligent new features. The new Outlook.com is certainly much prettier and faster than the current Outlook.com, although it is only available to a limited amount of users. While getting the new Outlook.com design is very easy if you have the “Try the beta” toggle, but that toggle isn’t available to all users at the moment.

There is, however, a very small “trick” spotted by The Verge that can be used to get the new Outlook.com design right away. All you have to do is open up Outlook.com, and change the URL on the address bar from https://outlook.live.com/owa to https://outlook.live.com/mail/#/inbox. Once you open up the new URL, you should be able to access the new Outlook.com design and try out all the new features.

There’s a problem with this trick though: once you visit the new Outlook.com manually, you won’t automatically join the beta program. Instead, you will have to manually change the old URL to the new one every time you open up Outlook.com. The only way to workaround this problem is to install a redirector extension on your browser — I’ve tried “Redirector” on Google Chrome and it worked perfectly. And once you have access to the new Outlook, don’t leave the beta program as you will not be able to get back to it even if you’re using the trick.

Update: It turns out making the new Outlook an “app” by using Google’s Chrome lets you access it without needing to modify the URL. You’ll need to be on the new Outlook page already, and then simply follow our guide on making websites into “apps”.

The rollout of the new Outlook.com shouldn’t take as long as the previous rollout which took more than year, as the new update doesn’t change much of the backend and infrastructure that powers Outlook. So even if you don’t want to use the trick to get the new Outlook.com, you’ll probably get it within a few months anyway.