[roadbeats]

Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app.

Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser.

It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.

[SahAssar]

For historical context: XMLHttpRequest was invented for outlook web access, so the idea and usecase preceded gmail.

[astrange]

The first time I saw it was in Google's Orkut, their first failed social network. But it did have cool AJAX.