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by tomp 2150 days ago
The original trade-off was having a non-sucky web email client.

GMail, the first real "client-side" app, was so far beyond Hotmail / Yahoo Mail in usability that it's hard to even phantom ever going back.
1 comments
astura 2150 days ago
I don't know where this misconception came from - XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft for use in Outlook Web Access, Gmail was essentially a copy of that.
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tilolebo 2150 days ago
True! I remember using OWA in my university around 2003, before the first invites for Gmail went out.

You could switch to the horrendous non-Ajax interface.

I never realized that before, always thought Gmail was the first Ajax webapp.

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tomp 2150 days ago
Ah, maybe. I didn't use OWA back then... And even now it's pretty shit (compared to GMail), so ...
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arexxbifs 2150 days ago
The first web versions of Outlook were plenty fast and usable on my then workstation (PIII 667 MHz w/ 256 meg). In fact, a lot of the web applications made 15 years ago were fast enough for comfortable use on Pentium 4 and G4 CPUs, because most used combinations of server-side rendering and vanilla JS. It was painful to develop, sure, but the tradeoff in place now is severely detrimental to end users.
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