Slashdot Mirror
The Troubles With the Yahool Mail Beta
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo Mail recently launched their new webmail service, dubbed Beta (yes just like gmail) no doubt hoping to win back market share in the world of webmail. Their prime competition is gmail, which they've modeled some of the new features on, but Yahoo Mail Beta falls very short of offering a similar experience. The ad infested new Yahoo Mail is patchwork of ideas halfway implemented and glaring usability problems."
Is the story interesting?
Yes.
Does the blog provide good information and sufficient media (i.e. pictures)?
Yes.
Should Slashdot wait/hope for another source like an official news paper to bring up this story instead of delivering the news as fast as possible?
Possibly, but not in this case.
Full Tilt
Because of course we all want to be using Outlook right??!!
;-)
Gmail has real innovation in an email client. Discussion topics are grouped, labels are better than folders and "archive and search" has changed the way I file emails - who needs an elaborate outlook style folder structures, just archive and search
I'm so used to Gmail for my personal email that I have installed Google desktop search at work (where we HAVE to use outlook) just so I can properly search my emails and I know longer have to spend all that time filing emails away in folders.
Once my users understand how it's meant to be used, it's a universal winner.
What seals the deal is being implemented with SSL POP access... so the dinosaurs who refuse to budge don't have to.
Better mousetrap
Relax... You're soaking in it." -Madge
Like most Google web products, GMail uses just the right amount of AJAX. It's used where necessary, and where the benefit clearly outweight the drawbacks.
Yahoo! Mail, on the other hand, does not make such a distinction. AJAX is used all over the place, even for tasks where it is not needed, if not outright detrimental. It's this excessive use of AJAX that makes it so slow. Whereas GMail often uses the most sensible technological choice, Yahoo! Mail just uses AJAX. And as with most typical AJAX applications, the number of asynchronous requests are massive, and consume much bandwidth and client-side processing time. On a broadband connection it is barely tolerable, and on dialup it is virtually useless.
AJAX in moderation can be beneficial. AJAX used for complete web application development is a recipe for disaster.
In Canada where we get the service through Rogers cable (they partner with Yahoo on their internet offering) we get 2GB of space on our mail accounts. Having said that I find I'm currently only using 430 Mb on my Gmail account and a fraction of that on my Yahoo mail account. Maybe I should get a life, on the other hand, it might show I have one ... you decide.
Although I prefer Gmail as my main mail account I think the Yahoo mail interface is not bad at all. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread they seem to be going for a desktop look and they're doing a decent job.
close but no sig
Because of course we all want to be using Outlook right??!!
I know you were being sarcastic, but quite frankly, the answer from millions of office workers would indeed be a resounding "Yes!"
I know this is slashdot. We're all more technical than that, and loathe outlook for a myriad of reasons. Yahoo! Mail isn't really targeted at us. We're a minority that can never really be pleased anyway.
The CEO, his executive assistant, HR, and the receptionist, on the other hand, like outlook, because it's what they know.
Firstly, Yahoo! Mail Beta is a (slightly) reworked version of Oddpost, which was doing its AJAXy goodness years before Gmail existed. Yahoo! bought Oddpost about three months after Gmail appeared (April 1 vs. July 9, 2004), which may have been a competitive response to gmail, but probably was already in the works. Very early Gmail really only had a few "killer" features, the big one being lots of space (1 gig), which all the major webmail providers matched within a few months (Yahoo! initially went to 100M from 10M, and then quickly moved to 1G). Considering that most people couldn't get a gmail account for months or years, this wasn't exactly an existential threat.
Even the original Yahoo! Mail was a purchased product (Rocketmail by Four11), but it really was an innovation for the day (March 1997). The purchased Oddpost product was also a true innovation (it pretty much was the first major AJAX application that was widely deployed - and isn't AJAX the Slashdot Subject of the Year?).
Getting to the substance of the "review" - yes, the ads are a bit obnoxious on free Yahoo! accounts. But in order to get his vaunted 20% ratio, the reviewer had to come up with a very specific and somewhat narrow screen resolution (828x588 pixels). The Yahoo! Mail Folder Pane is a fixed size (200 pixels) and has four, two-line ads. The ad pane (which only exists on the free accounts) is 160 pixels. The center pane (tabs, mail folder, preview page) automatically resizes to take up the rest of the page. At my normal viewing size (1200x800), the ads take up about 14% of the space - and considering I use Adblock Plus, it's really just some blank space over on the right.
The Contact list stuff is even more silly. Yahoo! Mail will automatically add anyone you've ever sent mail to to your Contact list if you want, or ask for confirmation before doing so. Every email you read that came from someone you've never sent an email to has an "add to contacts" button next to the "From:" address (it's a little folder icon with a plus sign). What more exactly do you want? I, for one, don't want anyone who has ever sent an email to me to be a "contact" - that would clutter up my contacts. The GUI for handling contacts, adding them to lists, adding more information about them and the like is much slicker and better integrated than the equivalent Gmail version.
The "ad" for Yahoo! Calendar on the bottom isn't an ad at all - it's a single line that lists your next 3-4 calendar items. It's rather new (it only appeared about a week ago or so) and gives you a nice GUI for scanning upcoming calendar items and quickly adding a new one. Yahoo! was (rightly) being hammered for not upgrading its Calendar to the same AJAXy-goodness of the beta email, so again, what's the harm? Apparently, they need to add a "turn this off" button or right-click menu option to satisfy the reviewer. Sure, that'd be nice but it's not something I'm worrying about one week into the new functionality.
And that's the "review of the review". What the reviewer leaves out is all the really great features of Yahoo! Mail. It does just about everything the way a standalone mail client does - slick GUI, drag-and-drop, a multi-tabbed interface integrated into the client, message searching (results go into their own tab) and a whole bunch more. In my experience, the spam filter has been a lot better than gmail's.
I like both mail systems, but for average users, Yahoo!'s is a whole lot more natural and useful. I'd love to see message threading in Yahoo! and a slicker GUI in gmail.
I have no idea what you're referring to. For me, a single conversation thread (both sent and received) is displayed all in one page, and I can apply multiple labels to the thread to have the whole thread appear in all relevant categorizations I want without having multiple copies of any of the emails within that thread. Can you clarify what you are seeing?
The only differences between labels and folders are that you can label something as work+project A+Reference and not be stuck choosing between your work->project A folder or your Reference folder, and it is a bit more difficult to select work+Project A than it is to click on work->Project A.
For me, it is better; I figured that out when I noticed myself looking for the archive button in other email systems.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's about Outlook. Yahoo is not trying to imitate GMail. They are trying make Yahoo Mail just like using Outlook or Thunderbird or Evolution or Eudora or whatever. That's why they have a preview pane. That's why you double-click to open the message in its own "window." This is how desktop clients do it. Yahoo simply used AJAX to produce the same kind of behavior. Probably the only webmail that would be similar would be Exchange/Outlook webmail (you know the product that introduced XmlHttpRequest before anybody had ever heard of AJAX...)
I've been using the Alpha/Beta/Gamma symbols behind the major.minor version since I've been programming (and thats now over 13 years). Like v0.1a was very early stage, 0.9b was almost a version. At a certain time I even went from A till R ; just because the updates were too minor but too important to be left out of my products at that time; since lots of programs were doors written for Remote Access and Proboard.
Yahoo is to my opinion using the beta tag with all respect ; just as you should respect the beta-tag which means all bugs and glitches will be ironed out in later versions.
Too bad they don't keep version files around so you can see the around-the-clock work of programming such new application towards their millions of subscribers. I don't use Yahoo mail; I don't know what even changed since their last interface; but Beta still means "Beta - in test - to be fixed - with trial and error".
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
That's very optimistic of you. Far more accurate, I suspect, is "Gmail is largely based on the idea that if a user keeps almost every message they ever get, then Google Inc., has a far far larger base of data in which they can mine." That this is a "better use for your time than managing your email", that's all well and good, but it isn't much more than a side effect.
I often like to compare Gmail to a web-based mouse-enabled version of Pine (especially if you turn on the keyboard shortcuts!). Yahoo! Mail is obviously an attempt to emulate Netscape Mail, Outlook Express, etc.
:P Yahoo! Mail is very slow (esp. on my 800 MHz Celeron laptop). Ultimately, I think that the fundamental problem with Yahoo! mail is that it uses AJAX to replicate a desktop paradigm on the web. Google, on the other hand, recognizes that the web is a fundamentally different medium and thus uses AJAX to create a web app with an interface paradigm that is appropriate for the web. The web is not the desktop, and I think that it needs a different approach that does not involve blindly porting over a desktop interface. But that's just my personal opinion...
It's two different paradigms and they're really not strictly comparable. For people who are more tech-savvy who are used to dealing with Pine on a Unix terminal or for those who are highly utilitarian, Gmail is great. For those who have been brought up on years of Outlook Express and are used to drag and drop, Yahoo! is great. More than anything, what someone thinks about the new Yahoo! mail really depends on that person's preferences and set of experiences.
On that note, here is my personal opinion: I love Pine and I love Gmail.