Slashdot Mirror
Preview of New MSN Hotmail
An anonymous reader writes "Here is a Preview of a new MSN Hotmail system, using AJAX. Currently in Beta testing." Most interesting is how the user interface more closely resembles a traditional local application. It's definitely a big step in that direction.
See below for attempts at justifying why Gmail is still better, despite anything Microsoft throw at us!
Come on, this is just too predictable.
This is good for Microsoft, as it gets people used to their interface and it will ease migration to the new Outlook 2003.
Personally, I find it atrocious. Gmail is lightyears beyond this in terms of usability.
Microsoft: Bringing our flakey, resource intensive applications to the web.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I suppose you could make the argument that if in the future software becomes more web-based, it's important to establish as much brand support as possible, because most people will follow the logos they feel more comfortable with.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
From the article:
"MSN describes Kahuna as an incubation project that has been built from the ground up utilizing the latest Web technologies, such as AJAX, a Web application architecture that combines HTML/Dynamic HTML (DHTML) with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XML, and other technologies."
I know how many hacks I needed to get the CSS for my (simple) web page working in IE. I feel sorry for the people trying to get something this complicated to look good...
:(){
..... How tied is this to IE, or by some miracle will it behave exactly the same under other browsers (Firefox, Opera, etc.)?
The article doesn't seem to give any insight on this.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
it support smtp, pop3, or have multiple gigabyte storage??, if not.. i'm not interested.
Wow, I have no idea where he pulled the "huge improvement over GMail" from. This HotMailEx just seems to be GMail with an annoying entry portal page that keeps you from your mail.
Unless he was talking about how great it is to have a right click menu. Wow, yeah, that's big.
John
It acts a lot like Outlook too! Now you can get email viruses from webmail!
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
It seems like every online service these days is advertising 'beta' status by stamping it in capital letters right by its logo. Why do these companies feel the need to put their beta logo in the same exact place that Google choose to place it in GMail?
Its a review of a preview.
How dissapointing.
I expect it will be as slow and irritating to use as Outlook Web Access. (webmail plugin for exchange)
My pics.
It looks nice.
Still, by far the nicest looking web-mail interface I've seen is:
http://www.goowy.com/
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
I hope it won't behave like "Outlook Express". My long lost friend.
...never looked sooo good.
Interface is nice, but man could those banners be any larger. Is Microsoft hard up for money or something.
Despite everything, it looks quite impressive... almost as good as OWA2003, which is saying a lot.
The Digital Couture Collection
Read the "Right Click Triumph" paragraph in the above screenshot. That just reeks of the following disclaimer:
Available only on Microsoft Operating Systems through any Web Browser named Internet Explorer.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Like in gmail? That is a huge plas and keeps my inbox much cleaner. The MSN looks nice... but still doesn't have what I want/need.
I see this as a validation of biodiversity and competition. Microsoft( or yahoo ) never would have spiffed up their web mail interfaces without pressure from competition.
I have a Gmail account and use it on occassion when I don't want to use my normal POP3 account. I like some things about Gmail and don't like others. Frankly, I think the comments people post about how Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc are kind of pointless, since people will just use whatever interface they prefer. I'll stick with Gmail since I use webmail so infrequently it makes no sense to change to something else right now.
Based on the screenshots, it looks like MS has done some pretty cool stuff with this interface. I didn't spend time reading the article, but it seems like some of the features would be hard to implement perfectly across many different browsers (drag-drop support, right-click support). However, if people want to use Firefox or Opera, they have Gmail as an option for web mail.
MS isn't forcing this service on anybody, and I'm not sure if there's any way they could. So, it's a good thing then. It's got some interesting features that the other webmail services don't have, and as such it's fostering competition. Slashdotters like to talk about having choices... well, this is just one more choice to choose from.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
In light of the previous thread about annoying adverts, I particularly like the feature where you can't actually see the body of the email because there are too many adverts on the page (eg see http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/mail_be ta_preview_05.jpg)
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Hehe, Come on MS, at least pick a name that isn't close to something used in Hawaii like Hula. I mean "Kahuna"? Can we copy a little more?
They call this innovation???? This is simply more of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" predatory practices. They have ripped off Google and Yahoo and are now going to take over the internet by ruining the free email service market by flooding it with this better free service. Write your congressman! Don't let them get away with this again! Save the world's free email services!
YHBT HAND
Want to make a good webmail ?
then :
- no ads every two pixels
- having servers not slow as hell
- having the possibility to send attachements not seen at virus everytime !!
- stop sending your fucking newsletter that I don't want to see !! (or make it blockable !!)
- more space ?
I don't like the monotonous shading, how about a black inbox with green letters?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
When I first asked my dad many many years ago why do we have to write our own function for snow-free character output when there's one provided by DOS I had no prejudice against Microsoft.
What I'd like to see is, how that thing works with Firefox and Opera.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
This looks like OWA included with Exchange 2003, but with ads. I'm sure it's virtually the same code.
-- Jason
.. and all Firefox users will get dumped into the old clunky interface.
Nevermind the fact that Google have proven it is trivial to make a useable dynamic interface work in most major browsers.
This next-generation kahuna interface makes extensive use of CSS, something IE totally sucks at. I would be interested to hear what the developers have to say about using CSS and these other technologies in IE and compared to Firefox. Pretty much every major web development house I know of develops on Firefox first, then hacks in the crap needed to make it run on IE. MS's team would obviously do it in reverse. I'd love to hear their comments on browser standards and IE 7's compliance with the standards that make this type of web application possible.
And how long will it take for MSN to change those 'Mail Beta Tip #x' graphics into obnoxious flash ads? My guess: one week after it exits beta.
Do I need a new monitor to use it?
I thought Hotmail went out back in 2002, or so. Too many ads, slow as hell.
GMail serves this purpose now, anyway.
And I, for one, welcome our new GMail overlords.
VOTE!
It seems that AJAX, while being a rather old idea, has taken over all new webapps these days. From Gmail to the Hula Project to the fantastic looking Zimbra Collaboration Suite, this reduced reliance on the old client => server model is a great step. I found more info on Kahuna beta from someone who wrote about it back in August.
...drool...
Now that I'm playing with Ruby on Rails I'll be very interested in the next 'killer app'; a Ruby on Rails/AJAX based webapp client.
fak3r.com
No free POP3 access? Then I don't care. And (not to sound like a billboard) if I'm going to pay X a year for an email address, I'd much rather pay about the same to godaddy for a domain and email account in which I have an entire domain at my disposal.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
mail.start.com redirects to the regular hotmail once yo sign in
6 4855
do you need a new account to get in?
http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?lc=1033&id=
Welcome to Mail Beta!
We hope you will enjoy the simpler and more intuitive design, expanded message storage, and automatically saved sent e-mail messages.
Since Mail Beta is being built from the ground up with new technology, we encourage you to use all the features. Tell us what you like as well as what you think is missing or needs improvement. Please don't hold back. We need and value your input. Thank you for your participation!
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Edit | Preferences | Web Features, click on the Javascript Advanced button, and tick "Disable or replace context menus".
Firefox has this feature, it's just disabled by default because it's almost universally used to disable right clicking on pages by people scared that their visitors might save images from their website.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I noticed that they have the right cick menu as well. What effect would this have on some school computers ( know mine likes to cripple the box so you can't right click, etc ) Are there any workarounds to counter things like this? Or at least being planned to counter?
I think that the "messages" column, combined with the folders column (Inbox,...) eats too much width.
:) ) by the use of that "beta" ? :)
Oh, and the cancel button is too close to "attach" drop-down in the compose mode. Especially in the compose mode : now you've written a long message and want to attach some file... oops !
Also I hope (naively ?) that those big banners on the top and left are only in the beta version.
About the name (mail^beta) : Does that mean that MS trademarked the "mail" word ? Are they voluntarily mimicking Google (sorry, "innovating"
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
It's saddening to see that the massive overhead of a big firm makes it so difficult to come up with a quick response. We're living in a fast world and while Google has the lightweight advantage over biggies like MS. The comment about things being rolled out in phases explains that they have too much on their plate and no wonders all the disgruntled developers are whining all over the net and walking away as well. I'm not sure when kahuna will be out. I've moved over to Gmail long ago (like many many others)...
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
All the screen-shots show a cluttered interface with giant, full-colored banners at the top and right side. Currently, the banners feature links to provide feedback for Hotmail beta. However, they're complete with cheesy stock photos of happy office people, so you get a good idea of how this app will look when MS starts selling this real estate for flash-based ads.
I switched to gmail a few months ago and it's taken me awhile to adjust to their tag and search paradigm. However, once I got over the illusion of control that comes from tediously sorting mail into folders and learned to rely on search for finding old messages, I became amazed by how much time I used to spend on administrative overhead for emailt. I find myself tagging fewer and fewer messages now. I just dump them into the archive, and seldom have more than five messages in my inbox. Finding old stuff with couple of search terms works beautifully, and replies I receive for ongoing conversations cause the entire conversation to re-appear in the inbox. It works very, very well. I read and respond to email faster as a result, also.
My biggest gripes with GMail is their poor contact management, but it's been worth the hassle. Also, they've yet to implement a couple of fundamental capabilities, like adding a 'mark as read' action to filters.
This way of dealing with email was hard to get used to, but turned out to be very liberating.
Gmail is better, because it has great localization/internationalization (including, for example, a Bulgarian spellchecker)...
"On the other hand, it's still early in Kahuna's development, and I don't recommend that anyone switch their production email account over to this service quite yet"
Hahaha, yeah right, if I have ANY alternatives to the HORRIBLE webmail interface that hotmail is right now, I'll take it, even if it's worse. You know why? Cause it can't get any worse, it can only wrap around and become better.
Ugh, I only have a hotmail account in order use MSN.. They changed their policies so that if you didn't log in for 45 days all your old mail got deleted. Wonderful. And being so stingy over two megabytes of disk space. Heh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think outlook express was the best email client out there for years, thunderbird only just makes level, and I'm not talking about features leaking all over the place, I'm talking about a clean interface that does the job. Outlook was a load of kack, but Outlook Express has one of the best email UI I have ever seen, and if it's been beaten, its been beaten by look-alikes.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
More disposable spam accounts!
But seriously, the new release of MSN Hotmail is meant to compete with Google's Gmail. It probably won't succeed either. The reason? Branding. Hotmail is already known as a cheap e-mail account with little storage space and restrictive rules of how often you must check your e-mail. With lack of archiving features and searchable features in the current Hotmail, many people have a bad taste.
Microsoft may try to make a new Hotmail, but the corporate branding simple isn't there. My prediction is that they will launch into an expensive advertisment campaign to push Hotmail or even force users to use Hotmail more than they do now by integrating Hotmail with other Microsoft software.
ok, its not because this is M$ or something, but what exactly is the fuss around those screenshots?
doesnt seem to have anything really new and innovative (go figure).
And that 3 column message-view will definetly suck...
http://by107w.bay107.mail.start.com/mail/mail.aspx
Looks neat, and I love the new Clippy too he's actually helpful this time!
They'll probably flood it with advertising so badly it'll look at cluttered and unusable as the current hotmail. Good thing I only use it for junk mail anyway.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Looks very promising. Hmmn, Hawaiian week at MS, then. I hope that Microsoft end up making an extremely good email client from Kahuna. It's not in anyone's interest for it to be a poor client. If Kahuna is good then the competition - Google, Yahoo, etc. - will be obliged to up their game. I guess an important question will be whether these new-generation clients are easy to use in Internet cafes and other public access sites, which often have dubious screens, crappy mice and clunky machines. They won't be so helpful if their devs assume users will have top-line gear on a good display at home.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Eudora was MILES ahead of Outlook Express. They somehow fucked up on marketing (they still do, I think they're not really interested in selling Eudora anymore) and the product stagnated. For a while, Eudora was the standard for emailers in Windows.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I'm curious if AJAX sites work well over dial-up or dsl connections at the margins of the service area. Lots of developers have broadband connections and may not take into account what the experience is like for people who are still stuck on slow connections. Google Maps obviously won't fly and nobody would expect it to. But what's gmail like over broadband?
Is there some utility that can clamp your broadband connection so you can test your work as if you were using it from a slow connection?
I use Excel quite a bit and was startled at how upgrading to a Raptor drive from a regular ide drive made such a huge difference when saving my work. Saves that took as long as 14 seconds on the old drive went through in 1-2 seconds. It made me wonder if the Excel developers were all decked out with the latest and greatest hardware and didn't have a clue as to how their code behaved on machines most of their customers would use.
Eyewash ?
Most interesting is how the user interface more closely resembles a traditional local application. It's definitely a big step in that direction.
Coincidentally a step in the direction of their other webmail offering: exchange server/outlook webmail.
Microsoft is showing the world that you can have powerful applications in a browser. With all the talks about a webicized office suite which they are scared of this only shows that soon enough we'll have such a thing. MS is between a rock and a hard plate. They can't go on stiffling innovation on the web side of things and whenever they show off web technology it makes people realize more and more that they shouldn't be tied down to their OS.
I'm getting more people to use gmail in areas that don't have broadband, specifically because of the lack of images. Works well for them, and they are happy.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
why not create a temp Hotmail account and sign up for a beta? I'd like to test the new beta with Firefox (and Adblock on) and post my results. It might work well...or not (primarily depending on which team was working on it).
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Looks to me like nothing more than a minor update to Outlook Web Access. If you like using Outlook, that's probably a good thing. If not....
Or, as a conversation at my job went not long after I started here:
Coworker: John down in ops told me they just upgraded to the newest version of OWA on our Exchange server. According to him, it's almost exactly the same as actually using Outlook locally.
Me: Wait, is that supposed to be a feature?
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
It was bad enough when they started putting IE inside Outlook windows. Now they've managed to put Outlook inside IE. Fantastic...
Well, the naming of the site, "SuperSite for Windows" should given people a clue as to the bias. Further poking around the site (read: going to the homepage) shows that the site pretty much discusses only Microsoft upcoming products, from Windows to Xbox360. I'm not insulting the site, or saying it's wrong about this Hotmail update, just that the site is biased in favor of MS, and we need to look at it from that angle.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1190 29. Interestingly, the team-members dodge a question about browser compatibility, but I will be surprised if they don't support Firefox just the way they do in start.com.
Microsoft's Outlook Web Client has had rich UI functionality for years, albeit only available for IE. AJAX is the new buzz acronym and is gaining momentum, however this technology in my mind is antiquated.
What we really need are simi-fat clients with all of the benefits of both browser applications and traditional fat (windows-type) client applications.
This simi-fat client paradigm can be accomplished now in .NET by hosting windows forms controls within IE. It is a pain to do currently, with all of the com-interop needed to talk to IE. Maybe this approach will gain momentum as the AJAX craze come to an end and browsers become increasingly smarter.
Ugh. I've always detested OE's interface. Off the top of my head, I can think of several e-mail clients I've used (used, not just tried) that I've preferred:
OE's interface is too cutesy, too limited, and it buries the more advanced features in hard-to-find, counter-intuitive places, when it doesn't leave them out entirely.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
Microsoft raised the default storage allotment to 2 GB, as per Google, but still requires customers to purchase Hotmail Plus at $19.95 a year to access the service via Outlook Express, Outlook, or other POP3-based email clients. I've been using Oultook Express and Outlook to access Hotmail for a long time now, and I never paid a penny. Of course, I don't get to use other "kool" features like calendar access and stuff, which I don't use anyways.
Anyone have any info on IMAP/SSL support? Webmail is nice, but being able to use Thunderbird/Mail.app/Outlook Express (ugh) is what really makes these free/cheap services nice for Grandma.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
Lets just wait and see if Hotmail still thinks it makes sense to:
1. Throw out all your received mail after 30 days unless you jump through hoops. No setting to keep it anywhere.
2. Throw out all your sent mail immediately unless you check a box each and every time. No setting to keep it anywhere.
Hotmail is a joke as far as a real mail system is concerned. How could anyone take that seriously?
The only thing they have done that is good is stripping the active content, web bugs and blinking graphics from identified spam. With all that calling home when you opened them there was just no slowing down the spam.
On the other hand if Bill Gates had been using Hotmail his old emails wouldn't have been discoverable in that lawsuit. Hmmm.
.
Interesting that the screenshots show start.com as the beta domain, yet, start.com routinely states that it isnt an official site.
The screenshots are all from IE. Any idea if Firefox and Opera would be supported? I know Outlook Web Access for Exchange servers does support both these browsers, but unlike IE, the interface in them does not resemble Outlook that much. They do a browser detect and then accordingly modify the interface. This, of course, breaks if, for example, I set Opera to identify itself as IE.
Can anyone provide a link to a site that describes how to implement these kind of features with AJAX? Also, an explanation of how Google Maps uses AJAX would be great too.
Any info is greatly appreciated!
I like MS. I really do. But the ads. Jesus f'ing christ. No amount of features would make me switch to that system, just like no amount of features in Opera would have made me switch (to the now gone ads-filled version).
Yeah, they're gonna be huge, possibly flash-based ads in the release version.
Google's advertising may be intrusive (thanks to their evil email scanning), but at least it's low-key and doesn't hog my precious screen real estate and bandwidth.
Other than that, though, the interface does look pretty slick. Hopefully it'll encourage Google to improve their own interface a bit.
Safari already had an XmlHttpRequest object when GMail launched. In fact GMail worked if you did UserAgent spoofing. It just was not officially supported.
And the XMLHttpRequest object was being written in Konqueror before GMail existed. GMail probably helped push it along though.
Aw, who am I kidding...
"That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you." -A. Whitney Brown
Now I can get all my spam looking really kewl!
Wow.
Thanks.
I think microsoft is biting themselves in the a$$ when I can check my Gmail from outlook for free, and I have to pay to get my hotmail in the same manner. dumb.
Check out the Kahuna demo at channel9
... not. What Slashdot user would use HotMail?! I mean really.
.. you can not move more than one mail at a time to move them into Junk folder.
And not to forget that even you've put check mark to indicate that current mail is a spam, it won't stop the same mail to pop up into your inbox another time. (Hint: "Sexually explicit" spam)
I have a free account. The size is 250MB and can access Hotmail via Outlook Express using http mail protocol.
So it looks slightly cleaner. What's with those ugly picture ads still? So you can drag and drop email into folders. Big frakkin' deal: Gmail automatically sorts my mail into folders for me without me having to drag them. It has an info bar that's supposed to protect me from phishing, spam and virus attachments? Well woop-dee-frakkin'-doo, I still think I'd have to block all mail from everyone I didn't manually add to my list if their filter isn't much, much much better. Etc etc etc.
This really reminds me of your stereotypical "ex-boyfriend". He had been a rather horrid human being, but I stuck with him for a while, out of past affection. The relationship keeps getting worse and worse. Until finally I met someone better who gets all the basics of a relationship right before showing me anything "fancy".
The new guy didn't bug me with crap, responds to what I need faster, present interesting information/messages to me in a clearer way, and even come up with a few surprises I didn't know was capable for a boyfriend. So months and even years later, the ex comes back and tells me he's changed. That he does this and that now. That he "is the rebirth of " boyfriend-dom.
Right.
No, really, I'm not bitter...
The Hotmail beta "resembles a[...]local application?" Local to what? I don't use Windows.
I wonder how broken it'll be in Safari.
-- often wrong; never in doubt
How about just taking it for what it's worth? A well-written application that isn't perfect and neither is Gmail.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
Hi, let me introduce you to this thing called "web mail". It's "mail". On the "web". With a cool, nifty interface. The whole point of the service is the cool, nifty interface. It's what you're paying for. If you don't need the cool, nifty interface, but instead your primary concern is having POP3 access to email, why would you be looking at a web mail solution in the first place?
And i'll continue using pop3 as my main access method. Frankly i dont trust microsoft can do anything without smacking ads all over, making it cumbersome and slow, welding a sink to it and calling it MSMail Xp Pro edition with proprietary sink welded onto it.
It doesn't seem like hotmail are adding cyrillic in example.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In my opinion, it looks like Hotmail Beta is a lot like Outlook Web Access, which is pretty cool. As far as compatibility goes, I think this new version of Hotmail will as compatible as Outlook Web Access - use anything but IE on windows, and it defaults to a 'lite' version.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
http://patcavit.com/2005/09/14/y-mail-beta-impress ions/
Looks VERY sharp.
Now, which one wins on FUNCTIONALITY? Dunno. That's obviously what matters most, but if we're going to talk about which looks most desktop-like, I think Yahoo! takes the crown, for now.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I have a number of Web-based email accounts like a lot of Slashdotters do. Hotmail is the only one however, that trashed years of my accumulated email just because I failed to log in for more than 30 days.
That's exactly the kind of thing I should have expected from a company run by a vindictive, immature OCD case who's a high-functioning autistic.
Insert witty sig here.
> > Microsoft coder bites can be very painful you know.
> May I have your sisters' phone number?
No, reeli! When she got bit, she was hacking her initials onto the Google front page from the sharpened end of an original clicky IBM keyboard given to her by Bill Gates - her brother-in-law - a Redmond software executive and star of many Microsoft products: "H0tmail Hands of a Redm0nd S0ftware Executive", "M0nkey B0ys of Passion", "The Neverending Devel0pers of Steve Ballmer".
Are you still sure you want that phone number?
I'm still waiting for the 250 MB inbox that hotmail promised was on the way. I'm still stuck at the old 2MB, which is pretty useless given how quickly that fills up with spam. Has anyone else been skipped over on the promised storage increase, or is it just me?
Give me more storage - THEN screw around with the interface.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Being forced to use outlook for so long, I've become used to have a calendar integrated into my email client. I really miss that feature in Gmail. I see that hotmail has one now, and yahoo has had it for ages. I hope someone at google picks up the idea.
Most of that page is the body of the e-mail.
You didn't notice that the MSN content in the middle IS the e-mail?
I bet ANYTHING this will premier with the release of IE 7, and will not work with anything but IE. Microsoft has finally come up with a way to get people back to their side of the browser war.
As usual, I and everyone on here will not be affected, but I bet IE use will jump in website stats. Time (and the quality of IE 7) will tell whether it will last.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Currently, MS's development process for hosted apps (MSN, Hotmail, MSN Search, etc.) is moving faster than for PC-based apps and OSes (Windows, Office, etc.).
It's no secret that MS's product management are using the hosted apps as experiments to see in which direction to take their other applicatons. Go take a tour of the Zimbra email client and see if you don't think it's striking fear into the hearts of MS's Exchange/Outlook product managers. Zimbra's not just different--it's obviously superior. MS needs to use Hotmail as the crucible for testing new features that they hope to shoehorn into Exchange/OWA in the future. If they don't, somebody like Zimbra's going to come and take their market share away.
So, if any company should be allowed to 'rip off' Google, it's Microsoft (in this case, anyways).
I still won't be using Hotmail because their spam filter sucks, thy have flashing (Slashdot style - this AMD+Gigabyte Newegg add is driving me nuttz) banner ads everywhere.
PS. can we stop calling it Ajax? Ajax cleans stuff.Xml/Http (XML over Http), or Asynch Xml/Http is a more appropriate name. Even call it AXmlHttp, AXH or anything- just not a cleaning supply's name, ok? =)
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
any way you put it Hotmail for me is still just a dump e-mail for filling forms or annoying "be a member" for downloads purposes.
I have so much crap coming in each day and the undesirable filter is pretty useless, i cant say how many times i have receive the same e-mail from the same sender and it still keeps getting through.
Gmail is way better.
What a crap, cluttered interface. If you got rid of the adverts, it might be usable.
By my calculation the ads take up almost 25% (probably more as some ads are only partly shown) of the total browser area. Micro$oft's response will probably something like this..
"mail beta is designed for M$ Vista users. As Vista's hardware requirements will require most users to upgrade their PCs to do anything useful anyway, we will be recommending users upgrade to a display adapter capable of supporting at least 2048x1536, lowering the browser area taken up by ads to around 5%."
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
September 14: Yahoo announces it's new mail beta which "the new user interface mimics that of a traditional desktop e-mail application, rather than what we see in most Web-oriented systems."
October 10: Microsoft discloses it is developing a new version of Hotmail which will "emulate the type of experience users get with traditional Windows-based email applications, such as Outlook and Outlook Express, but in a browser-based Web environment."
September 13: Microsoft executives host an internal event for employees to explain the recent management reorganization. Gates speaks: "I'd definitely say this is one of those periods, partly because they haven't seen the pipeline, partly because other companies are in what I call the Honeymoon period, where their me-too products are considered, you know, more innovative [throws hands up]."
When Microsoft treats users as novices they get slammed. When Apple treats users as novices they are heaped with praises.
The difference is that Microsoft seems to try and make sure people stay novices forever. Apple helps out novices but tries to help them learn new things as well.
One way this is evident is Microsoft changing more advanced portions of interfaces over time, so that an advanced users of one version of the OS (or Office) may have to learn how to do the same advanced thing again in the next release. Apple has been much better at taking an evolutionary approach to interfaces and thus letting people carry knowledge forward.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This seems to be an interesting upgrade to an old and rapidly aging Hotmail interface. Though, I hope Microsoft open it's eyes and expand the service to encompass entire browser array. . If mozilla browsers are so good, they would rapidly support the languages in which Kahuna uses and enable mozilla browsers to use the new Hotmail. Dspite the requirements, I welcome a change to the interface to the old and current one.
And some have complained how Microsoft how treats it's computer users. Well, majority of internet users are newbies. All they know how to do is turn on a pc, open up AOL, MSN, or other ISP applications, and chat with email or IMs. It's how spyware and viruses spread so easily. People are just to dumb to understand to keep from being infected or avoid spyware.
It's why companies like Mandriva and Linspire are producing Linux distributions that are user friendly.
It's why Apple Computer redesigned MacOS into the user friendly MacOSX.
It's why Operating Systems in general developed what is called the GUI
Computers will always sport better and better GUIs because majority of it's users don't know how to take full advantage of their pcs. There is still the advanced users and elite classes of computer users who still prefer Command-Line interface but until majority are computer users fall into this category, Microsoft and companies will still develop applications and web interfaces for the 'dumb' computer user.
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with this so called update. Ive had a hotmail account since I was 15, Im now almost 22. I stopped using it everyday almost 2 years ago because of the slow response, horrible junk mail handling, and it is just downright ugly. I am very happy with Gmail even as a beta product, space is great, labels are very useful, and attachment size is a big plus for me. If anyone is interested in a better AJAX product they should check out www.zimbra.com. This little bit of OSS looks to be a great mail client. In the meantime I will continue to trash 99% of the emails I get on hotmail since their junk filter wont work right.
Everybody knows you have to kill the head coder; otherwise you're only dealing with symptoms.
Are there any spunky AJAX webmail clients that can login to IMAP/POP accounts...that you can download and run on your own server (a little like MS Exchange, but with 3rd party support and element of being free). I love the drag and drop idea.
The Open Source Zimbra AJAX email server/client is news. When MSN develops a commercial application, that's just an advertisement. Well, I guess you can use it as a confirmation that it's the direction email is going, since commercial vendors are deploying the technologies.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
... It's still a big juicy turd. I'll never go back to Hotmail. Ever. Why? I had an account long before Microsoft bought them. It was really nice back then since webmail was brand new. Compare then and now:
Then:
1. No cookies. Period.
2. No Javascript required. Any browser worked.
3. Free POP3 access.
4. Free auto-forwarding to any other account.
5. Almost no ads. Just a short tag line in sent e-mails and maybe one graphical ad per page at the most.
6. No limit to how long you can be away. I was away from the Internet for 3 to 4 months and still had my account and all e-mails when I came back.
Now:
1. Cookies galore.
2. Javascript everywhere. Must have certain browsers just to log in, along with Javascript enabled.
3. No free POP3 access without paying and/or using proprietary software.
4. Cannot auto-forward to another account.
5. Ads everywhere, including the annoying Shockwave flash ones.
6. Lose all your e-mails if you don't log in every 30 days or so.
7. Hotmail deletes all your sent messages -- That was the final straw one day when I lost all sent messages.
8. Far less storage than the competition and always behind in features.
9. Far more spam.
10. Not enough filters.
Now excuse me, why should I go back to Hotmail after switching to Yahoo and Gmail eons ago?
This is Outlook Web Access 2003. I can't tell you how much I hate this interface. Gmail exceeds this interface as far as usablity in all respects. Once again, Microsoft takes the innovations of other and passes them off as their own... and the stained glass window of death rolls on.
Dunno but their Start page is quite cool, something like Netvibes but (IMHO) better.
That looks very similar to google.com/ig
However IIRC start.com was around first. Hmm. Was MSFT the "innovator" here?
Nah! Couldn't be!
put the what in the where?
I think they do have "mark as read" in filters.
You should again.
"MS isn't forcing this service on anybody, and I'm not sure if there's any way they could."
Of course they are. Just like the NYTs forces us to view their content.
"If you don't like it, don't use "
The advertisers made me do it.
I've enjoyed following the follies of MS-owned Hotmail for years. Remember when they tried to switch from Sun to NT servers? Ah, good times. I've been dissatisfied with the speed and interface of Hotmail for some time. First, they stopped bringing you to your Inbox and made you stop at a splash screen with more ads on it. Then, the pages became slower to load, probably so that you would be forced to look at an ad for a longer period of time. Now, they want to force me to use IE to read my e-mail, unless I want to pony up another $20/month to use POP3 retrieval methods.
Now that most ISPs have a web interface that allows you to read email when you are at a foreign PC, or you can use USB drives to load a browser, the most compelling reason to use Hotmail or Yahoo! or Gmail is... storage? Thanks, but I think I can live with Comcast's web email instead.. it's one of the few things they do right.
I saw the preview screenshots and I think it looks great. I can't wait! It looks much better than gmail.
Ditto, except using Apple's Mail.app. instead of Outlook.
Blank until
Honestly, the Kahuna interface, along with the new Yahoo! mail interface, is much better than Gmail. If it were practical to import all my Gmail messages to either (and be guarenteed to get the new interface), I'd switch to one or the other. Of course, there's a fairly high change Google will get the message soon and make an interface such as this optional for Gmail (there'd be too much negative backlash if they forced it upon users)...but until then, don't claim that "Oh no, these more advanced interfaces are much worse than Gmail, because not only can Google do no evil, it can do no wrong." As soon as Gmail has it, you'll be ranting about how "innovative" Google is.
"A lot of users need to be at Internet Explorer (IE) 5.5 or above or equivalent to take advantage of these features." [emphasis mine]
Ah, so now I can get in with NCSA Mosaic? W00t!
After I RTFA, I have to say that there's no way this is even remotely close to the final product. Where are all the embedded ads, Active X, pop-ups, and links to MSN?
This service looks exactly like Microsoft's Exchange server that comes with Outlook and is part of the office suite, except the server hosting, and content storage is done on MS's servers, and thus come free to the user - aren't they considering market cannibalization of their office suite? I know my school http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/ might not have the same incentive to purchase Exchange if Hotmail offered the same service for free.
It's full of advertisements!!
Seriously, I can count at least 3 of them.
The only email feature that I would consider an improvement is challenge-response. When an email arrives at my server, I want it to send a response with a passcode in an image that the sender must read and enter into a form before their original email is delivered to me. Currently I use a whitelist so that if I don't know you and approve of you, I don't get your email. The only problem with that is that neither I nor the sender knows that the message wasn't delivered. But at least I'm no longer tempted to extend my penis.
...is the most annoying acronym ever. I know this is off topic. I'm sorry. But "AJAX" is just a really, really annoying acronym. It sounds like a breakfast cereal or something.
I say use Roundcube webmail!
It's an Alpha release, but it's definitely worth having a look at it!
* The ads are WAY too intrusive. Can't you learn anything from Google Ads?
* The text body in screenshots 2 and 5 are clipped (by the ad? I dunno)
* C'mon M$. The "Allow or block" option at sender-address level is not going to work and you know it. GMail's spam filters (I guess they are bayesian) work much better. Few spam pass thru them.
It will change because in 2 years Excel and Word will be web-based, with the same user experience for 95% of users as desktop applications- except that it will be easier to share documents.
I personally don't care for either. Web mail generally sucks compared to a goo e-mail client. But for the sake of argument, why do you think that the new MSN mail is better than Gmail? From the article, all I see are features where MSA is catching up to Gmail - not surpassing it. Are you implying that because it is Microsoft, it must be better?
My only complaint is attachments. Attachments are limited to 10MB, so if you have more than 10MB of photos to send, you have to make separate messages. Why is this? I suspect because they don't actually want people to fill up their 2.6xxGB of space. Secondly, searching won't find attachments. If I have 500 e-mails from someone, and I remember someone sent me something as an attachment, my only recourse is to try to remember the approximate date they sent it and browse through e-mails from that time period... which reminds me of another gripe: the only way to browse messages is to start at the beginning, or the end, and page through. Meanwhile Gooooooooogle Web Search lets you click on an O to get to a certain page of results, which is useful I'm not sure how. Either a scroll box, or a "jump to page/date" combo box would be immensely useful.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Ironically, the most frustrating part of gmail for me is their search feature. The search is almost useless because it doesn't support word stems - if my email has the word "cows" and I search for "cow", it won't find it.
I don't understand why they didn't just apply the full google search algorithm to gmail. Having the "Did you mean?" feature from google would be useful too.
If you don't need the cool, nifty interface, but instead your primary concern is having POP3 access to email, why would you be looking at a web mail solution in the first place?
:)
I insist on having POP3 access from work and home because it's way more convenient for everyday use.
I also insist on having an ISP independent email account and address that stays with me, regardless of if I change residence or employment; hence web mail.
I also insist on easy access from anywhare on the globe (with Internet access); hence web mail.
For the latter two requirements I can put up with a "cool nifty" interface -- the new Hotmail still somewhat resembles the WinXP (or KDE) kindergarten style. (Although Google did a fairly elegant job with Gmail.)
I hope this clarified the matter
Most email (almost all that I have seen) solutions offer a web interface. True, most users don't even know what an email client is, and would probably say IE is there email client. But generally, email is email. The only reason most free emails have switched to webmail-only for non-paying subscribers is to get money from the power users, not to focus on their webmail client.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
That is an interesting take.
It sounds like you are saying "Microsoft is willing to try something completely new (innovate?)", while "Apple only takes existing stuff that you know and polishes it up a bit".
Go read Jakob Nielson's take on the new Office: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html
AOL has had an AJAX based webmail out for months now. And it seems pretty good. But nobody seems to notice...
It's more like "Microsoft dances around good UI design without ever getting it right (here I'm really mostly talking about Win 3.1, 95, 98, 2K, XP) whereas Apple takes the time to get things generally very good from the start and then works from that base for a long time, refining it to smooth out the roughest parts.
To say that Microsoft is willing to try something new is giving them far too much credit; What they are willing to do is chase new shiny UI objects.
As for Nielson's article, Results-Oriented UI's are hardly a new idea. Many people and products have fallen on that sword. And I only agree with Neilson about half the time, in this case rather less than more.
I am not saying the new Office interface will nessecarily be bad or unuseful. What I am saying is that whatever the new interface is, you can count on the next version of Office after that to change it substantially enough that you'll require a lot of re-training just to do the same things you did before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it's also a microsoft owned web application though... so i'm trying to figure out if they even care about mac support still. :
in Evo, Thunderbird, mutt or whatever using hotwayd. GIYF.
No thanks to MS.
The interface is similar to the Outlook Web Access. No big deal.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Do you really believe that revamping the entire user interface MODEL (not just new or bigger or more colorful icons, but the whole way of using the application) for Office is just about chasing shiny things?
At the heart of it, yes. That model is as I said rather old, and it just happens that people who are in love with it have enough power now to push the idea into the general market. As I said I personally am not sure if it will owrk or not - that is irrelevant to my argument. I am saying that even within this new model, at the next iteration of Office Microsfot will shift substantially how Office works under that model enough to require re-thinking how you use the program. The model is not pertiennt and again, I am realyl neutral on the new model itself as I don't know tha it will work but I don't know that it wont. Keep focused on teh question at hand which is; does Microsoft make a lot of changes to programs that keep users at a basic level of understanding because most releases advanced features are "shifted" enough in terms of access that for most users they are lost and must be re-discovered. That is the EXACT sin I am accusing Microsoft of, no more no less. Nothing to do with a new model (though I am saying there they do tend to chase some things just because they seem cool rather than fucntional which is I think what got you riled).
What changed over time with Microsodt was not so much the user interface model as how things were structured within that model. You are confusing the two things. I am not talking about the pure theoretical "model" but the practical implentation of a given program and commands therein. I am talking about stuff like the admin screens changing location from release to release, or how the taskbar changed every release to do new an unplesant things to you (though that was something of a model shift at times with things like folding icons).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hope they were smart enough to include a DELETE button.
That's one up on Gmail already.