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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.
What I'm wondering is why it took them so long. XMLHttpRequest was invented for Exchange's web access back in the 90s, wasn't it? Why wasn't Microsoft first off the block with public AJAX webmail too?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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.
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
Actually, Google proved that it is trivial to make browsers implement the features you want if only you generate enough buzz for a web application that requires them. GMail didn't work in Opera, Safari or Konqueror when it was first launched, but they soon implemented XMLHttpRequest when all the Internet Explorer and Firefox users were talking about how good it was.
Don't equate "GMail works in most popular browsers" with "Google worked to make GMail compatible". It's more a case of "Google made it work in two browsers and forced the other browser vendors to scramble to catch up by implementing a non-standard Javascript/ActiveX object".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha