[FirmwareBurner]

>It's UX was miles ahead of anything else.

Not my experience. UX was more or less in line with everyone else, UI just looked cleaner and prettier because it didn't yet have obtrusive ads compared to the competition.

Gmail was groundbreaking because it offered 1GB of storage at launch compared to measly 100MB or so from Yahoo or Microsoft.

Google brand name + invite only scarcity at launch + huge storage space + no ads at launch = the formula the drove initial popularity.

[ctvo]

Gmail was the first single page application I remembered using. It was eye opening to many people what the web could be as an application platform. You could compose a message and have it follow you as you read other emails, for example. It was not just about storage space: Gmail was better in every way. Even the spam filter was smarter and better than everyone else’s for a very long time.

[pilaf]

Exactly. It was also one of the first mainstream web apps to make widespread use of XMLHttpRequest. The term AJAX hadn't even been coined at the time of Gmail's release, and it was probably a major factor in the popularization of the technique.

[happymellon]

Then they disabled the delete key from deleting an email.

Why would anyone do that?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Why would anyone do that?

Part of the trend of needing to dumb down everything by removing "power" user features because we can't trust non-computer savvy users to not self immolate their data.