Webmail and suites

Webmail and suites

Posted Mar 1, 2007 22:20 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox (Inc) by muwlgr
Parent article: Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox (Inc)

I am afraid that webmail is here to stay. It is another way to look at your mail, very convenient when in a roaming mode. It can even be made easier than many mail clients, as Gmail has shown.

As I have already recalled here on LWN, when Netscape Communicator 4 was finally released in 1997 many of us were flabbergasted. What was this 4 MB-odd monster that was being deployed on us? Web browser, of course; mail client, why not; but the rest... A news reader? A stupid IRC client? A cheesy HTML designer? Was this a joke? Why carry all that baggage just to browse the net? I don't want to have all those processes on my back! If I want email notifications I will install an applet that does them, thank you very much!

You know, the problem of a suite is that it's like a Katsuhiro Otomo manga, it tends to aggregate everything in its path. Look at Microsoft Office or even at OpenOffice for examples. If you have the resources to spare it's fine, I guess. 7 years after that, Firefox emerged as a lean browser once again; you can even integrate it with Thunderbird if desired. Now Microsoft has some competition once again. But SeaMonkey is not it, sorry.

---

(Log in to post comments)