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It's true that Hotmail & Yahoo were available well before Gmail, but pre-AJAX webmail wasn't fit for serious use - it was more of a backup for people traveling,
by tacostakohashi 12y ago
It's true that Hotmail & Yahoo were available well before Gmail, but pre-AJAX webmail wasn't fit for serious use - it was more of a backup for people traveling, or for ad-hoc use, and most email use was from desktop software (Eudora, Outlook Express, etc).
Gmail was really the first webmail usable as a person's only email address, lot least because of the 1G storage on offer.
- digisign 12y agoNot sure I agree. Webmail has always been usable for normal people, while power users could and do use a dedicated program. Gmail did bring innovations, of course, but competitors copied them. I've noticed Gmail users tend to be unaware of alternatives and always wondered why that is.
- Al-Khwarizmi 12y agoI was a user of Yahoo mail from 1996 or so, and it fit my bill just fine. I preferred it to POP and IMAP clients as I could use it from anywhere without worries. The pure HTML interface was much leaner and faster than the bloated Ajax versions that came later, and I kept using the old HTML version and disabling new versions until they definitely phased it out. I did switch most of my use to Gmail when it came out, but it was due to superior search and more space, not due to Ajax.
- slavik81 12y agoI signed up for hotmail in 1998 and didn't use a desktop client for it until maybe 2008. It was perfectly fine for me as a student, though I did wish I could attach larger PowerPoint presentations.