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Gmail Marks Five Years In Beta
TrekkieTechie writes "Though in fact the big day was April 1st, Google celebrated the five-year anniversary of the popular online email service Gmail with a post on the service's blog, saying 'we want to give a big thank you to all of you who use Gmail every day, to those who've been around since the beginning, to those who were using an AJAX app before the term AJAX was popular, to those who started chatting right in your email ... we couldn't have gotten here without you.' The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label."
Gmail is the beta for the Google Apps mail component. It's not likely that it will ever come out of beta status: it being beta has a function.
the pun is mightier than the sword
"Beta" is just being used as a buzz word to make Gmail perpetually seem like the hip new computer thing.
You could say that not now.
Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.
This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.
Frankly, I'd much rather have Outlook be gone, for several reasons:
- Gmail is pretty solidly technically superior, in most of the ways we care about. Example: It doesn't fall over if you put several hundred thousand emails in the same "folder".
- Gmail moves the data off of the end-user's computer. Far, far too many Outlook setups (especially in small businesses) store everything locally, with no backup -- one hard drive crash away from all that archived email gone.
- Gmail is platform-agnostic. It's actually annoyingly browser-aware, but all browsers are supported somewhat, and among the fully-supported browsers are Firefox and Safari, and Gecko and Webkit both exist for every platform I care about. That's one baby-step closer to Linux on the corporate desktop.
- Google actually seems to support open standards -- for example, Gmail includes GTalk, which operates over Jabber. Email is available via IMAP, and calendars via caldav. Contrast to Outlook/Exchange -- the Halloween documents show that Microsoft deliberately chose proprietary protocols, as well as proprietary extensions/perversions of existing protocols.
Now, I'd still prefer we all start improving the existing open implementations, and get to where this is entirely open standard, commodity stuff, just like IMAP and SMTP is today. But Gmail would be a marked improvement over Outlook, in many ways.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
i used to have a lot of problems with gmail hanging, especially when dealing with attachments (either inbound or outbound). also had a stretch of time where it would never actually get to the inbox after i entered the login credentials, and i would sit at a white screen hours no matter what i did. but since i started logging in at the https version i have had no issues. YMMV of course, but give it a shot.
...because there are still some very persistent performance issues that need to be worked out. The AJAX interface is incredibly sluggish on just about any browser/CPU combination I use it with. Very frustrating to have to wait seconds after each submit for the interface to respond.
This is further proof of the fallacy that just because something is affiliated with Google, it must be a good thing.
Long live mutt. (Don't laugh...the response time for mutt on even my slowest machine is several orders of magnitude greater than Gmail.)
GMail doesn't work so well when your company of 400k+ people cannot access it through the company firewall and frankly yes, that is Google's fault.
It's Google's fault the company firewall is misconfigured?
a provider that has free services should not share a network with proprietary data.
...why not?
It's google's fault that every hack that can make a gmail account now doesn't know anything better than to think their new account is the k-rad 31337.
Yeah, because I totally used l33tsp34k all over my post, and Google told me to. Oh wait...
Browsers should NOT be virtual machines.
Why not?
Fuck you, I'm not getting off your lawn.
If you want to write an application, write an application. If you want to navigate data and present it, you use *HTML.
And the two are not mutually exclusive. Much as you might not like to admit, applications have been built on such unlikely platforms as VBA. Frankly, given the choice between that and the Web, I'll choose Web every time -- Javascript is a much better language than VB anyhow.
You don't make a single substantial point.
Nor do you. You state a few opinions, without really giving any reasons why.
Browsers should not be virtual machines, and proprietary data should not be on the same network as a free service, because teknopurge says so!
Let's start with that very simplest of claims: Browsers should not be virtual machines. Why not? Why shouldn't the browser be a generic application platform?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!