Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout

Stony Stevenson writes "Google on Tuesday confirmed it is giving Gmail a new look. This blog post has screenshots of a new Gmail interface that has been made available to a limited number of users. They are calling it "Gmail 2.0" even if Google isn't. Google confirmed the update is underway at its new San Francisco office, just prior to a briefing on an unrelated upcoming Google announcement. A Google spokesperson said that the new look has been made available to about one percent of all Gmail users and is being rolled out the rest on an ongoing basis."

Comments

2.0?

[Sporkinum]

I guess I didn't realize that gmail was past 1.0 yet. I thought it was still a beta.

Re:2.0?

[Chelloveck]

The whole "Beta" thing that google and company do is really starting to piss me off. It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

I lay the blame at the feet of open source developers who started this nonsense. Far too many open source utilities have had years of stable versions numbered <1.0. These apps are in permanent "beta" simply because the developers don't want take responsibility for a finished product. It ate your hard drive? Ooh, sorry. You gotta expect some bugs in a beta. We expect it to be finalized sometime before the heat death of the universe. But don't quote us on that.

Re:2.0?

[alexgieg]

You prefer that users expect 1.0 to mean 'beta'?

Thanks to Microsoft, I think most already do. Isn't it common nowadays for users in general, and those in TI in particular, to expect any new OS developed by them to only work correctly after its first service pack? I know I do. 2000 wasn't good. 2000 SP-1 (or more, I don't remember) made it good. XP wasn't good. XP SP-1 was. Vista isn't good. Vista SP-1 probably will be. And so on and so forth.

Actually, even back in the days Microsoft used numbers to differentiate product versions, it was common sense that "x.0" versions weren't worth it. Those who knew advised users to prefer a previous version with a higher number after the dot, as by then it would be stable and actually working as expected...

In short: whenever Google decides to remove the "beta" tag from Gmail, I doubt they're going to call it "Gmail 1.0". It wouldn't be good for business.

Re:JavaScript back-end?

[Khuffie]

From a purely client-side perspective, what he sees, the images, html and all that, is the front-end. What deals with all the different states on the client-side, is also the back-end.

Re:JavaScript back-end?

[BESTouff]

It's the frontend's backend. What's hard to understand here ?

FTP loses based on ease of use

[sjbe]

Sheesh, when will people understand that EMAIL was *not* concieved for large binary attachements...

They won't. Not trying to be snide but that battle was lost long ago. It does not matter that FTP is technically more efficient and better designed for file transfer. Attaching a file is simple and, like it or not, using an ftp server involves more steps, additional software, additional security, and additional training. FTP fails the mom test. It's harder than attaching a file for NO additional benefit to the user in 99.999999% of cases. Furthermore, most people do not have or know about ftp servers, they have email accounts. So they use the tool they have and know how to use.

Does this cause problems for the network admins? Sure. Doesn't matter though. Ease of use/learning for the user wins here. If you want ftp to be used, make it easier to use than attaching a file and people will flock to it. Until then, it's going to be used only by nerds like me in the few special cases where ftp is the only alternative.

Re:Why not use a protocol concieved for attachment

[MonoSynth]

...and how are binaries on usenet less hackish than binaries in e-mail??