Preview of New MSN Hotmail

An anonymous reader writes "Here is a Preview of a new MSN Hotmail system, using AJAX. Currently in Beta testing." Most interesting is how the user interface more closely resembles a traditional local application. It's definitely a big step in that direction.

Dear Mr Microsoft

[Dam's]

Want to make a good webmail ?

then :
- no ads every two pixels
- having servers not slow as hell
- having the possibility to send attachements not seen at virus everytime !!
- stop sending your fucking newsletter that I don't want to see !! (or make it blockable !!)
- more space ?

No...

[Bogtha]

Edit | Preferences | Web Features, click on the Javascript Advanced button, and tick "Disable or replace context menus".

Firefox has this feature, it's just disabled by default because it's almost universally used to disable right clicking on pages by people scared that their visitors might save images from their website.

Re:Hehe...

[xtracto]

Dunno but their Start page [start.com] is quite cool, something like Netvibes but (IMHO) better. Who knows... maybe someday they will offer that service instead of the terrible MSN home page.

BTW, where are all the ads? One of the (many) reasons for me to stop using Hotmail was the animated ads and banners. I would expect those from a porn site but not from my email account. I am sure those will be there when the service goes open.

Oh! and on a sligthly OT note, I guess I wont move to Hotmail again... as in my University (somewhere in UK) the IT people blocked the hotmail URL because it was very dangerous hahahaah nice and lovely.

Easy...

[VP]

Gmail is better, because it has great localization/internationalization (including, for example, a Bulgarian spellchecker)...

Re:One thing comes to mind....

[garcia]

..... How tied is this to IE, or by some miracle will it behave exactly the same under other browsers (Firefox, Opera, etc.)?

If you remember GMail, when it was first released, didn't have very good support for other browsers but over time they worked on support for them.

So, even if this *Beta* doesn't have support and the first public release doesn't either, it doesn't mean that in the future they won't.

I'm not holding my breath though.

Re:Hehe...

[PsychicX]

Why didn't Google do email years earlier? Why didn't Sun, who as we know absolutely love these sorts of apps, do any AJAX apps?

The bandwidth, connectivity, and general interest in the internet, as well as the sheer concept of something like AJAX, is relatively recent. It's only recently occurred to people to do this sort of thing at all.

A bit false...

[brunes69]

Safari already had an XmlHttpRequest object when GMail launched. In fact GMail worked if you did UserAgent spoofing. It just was not officially supported.

And the XMLHttpRequest object was being written in Konqueror before GMail existed. GMail probably helped push it along though.

The article is inaccurate anyways.

[hackwrench]

I have a free account. The size is 250MB and can access Hotmail via Outlook Express using http mail protocol.

Re:Hehe...

[Desco]

The ads are there... Currently they're disguised as "Email Beta Tip #n", but the fact that they even put those huge top and side banners in the beta shows us that, yes, in fact, there is going to be huge, obtrusive, annoying, (and hopefully AdBlockable) ads.

I wonder if this is gonna work on any browser other than IE on Windows... Start.com, amazingly, works with Firefox for Windows... (Sorry, haven't checked Firefox for Linux)

Re:Oh the Irony

[caseih]

My code is almost always xhtml compliant. And IE does a very poor job of rendering it. In fact I don't think IE 6 even supports the strict xhtml doctype. And CSS *does* suck on IE because if I code to the standards, things just don't work as one should expect. The box model is wrong, the alignment system is not consistant, etc. So if one was to sit down with a CSS and xhtml book and try to write a decent web page according to the specs, you just can't do it in IE unless you code for the bugs, which of course breaks the page on all other browsers. Even if all you ever do is use IE, CSS is broken enough so as to make it painful to use, even when you know about the IE bugs.

Re:Hehe...

[j_snare]

I agree with you, and enjoy my GMail account tremendously ("Hooray, no spam here!"), but figured I should probably bring up the fact that GMail does currently have an inactivity period as well. Granted, it is 9 months, but a time limit is a time limit. Yahoo seems to have much the same system going with theirs, but I was able to reactivate the mailbox automatically. I don't know if either Hotmail or GMail will do that yet.