[FluffyKitty]

I used the Fastmail site today after a long time to change some setting and noticed the UI had been updated. Really liking the new look, great job to you and your team!

I was interested in what front-end library you guys were using so I did a bit of searching and found a twitter post about OvertureJS. I know this is kind of random, but I'd love to understand how you guys came to the decision to build a framework from scratch instead of relying on Angular/React. What kind of technical limitations did they have that you guys wished to tackle with Overture?

[chrismorgan]

This was long before I started; but the simplest answer is that there were no good options meeting our requirements when Overture was developed, which is back starting around 2010. (Overture has been the foundation for our webmail since late 2011 when that interface was released as beta.) Also do note that Overture does a lot more than just “Angular” or “React”, which I am not inclined here to expound; you’d need quite a few more libraries to equal it—a surprising number of which genuinely don’t exist in open source, so you’d still be writing a lot from scratch. Overture is definitely slanted towards being a web app development library (yet without being a heavyweight and strongly-opinionated-in-UI-matters beast like ExtJS).

When you care about performance, there’s still a lot to be said for controlling the full stack.

[FluffyKitty]

Thanks for taking the time to respond!