Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop [LWN.net]

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 15:31 UTC (Mon) by walters (subscriber, #7396)
In reply to: Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop by alankila
Parent article: Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Basically, "Web applications" aren't just a desktop application rewritten in HTML and JavaScript. They have fundamentally different properties; compare Flickr versus gphoto or F-Spot.

In the particular case of email, I've found that GMail search (because it runs in the data center) makes a significant difference in my experience versus Evolution or Thunderbird; the latter two basically being unusable.

Anyways, there's plenty of stuff on the web about this. Just a random link, here's a 2001 essay from Paul Graham on how web applications change things:

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

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Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 19:58 UTC (Mon) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]

I'm kind of surprised that you find search in Evolution/Thunderbird unusable. Where I'm currently working we're using Google Apps, so all mail accounts are Gmail accounts; except I'm accessing my mail using POP so I can use Evolution. With 30000+ emails (around a gigabyte), search in Evolution is still about as fast as searching in Gmail, except that I find it a bit easier to do searches in Evolution because you can search using more criteria. If I use tracker to search my mail, I get comparable functionality to Gmail's search, but it's a lot faster than either Evolution or Gmail.

I think the biggest advantage that Gmail (or other web mail services) have over conventional email clients is that they seem to have a better UI. I prefer Gmail's "conversation view" to the conventional threaded display in Evolution or Thunderbird, and I also think that Google made a wise decision by just going with labels rather than having conventional folders plus search folders, since labels are just as expressive and provide a uniform interface to mail. There are also small other ways in which the Gmail UI is more innovative (and I think better), like showing text snippets after the email subject, showing you who has replied in the thread (and approximately what order), etc.

Of course Gmail is still lacking in enough areas (specifically good support for mailing lists, and more fine-grained filtering options) that I am using Evolution as my primary mail client. But with the recent rumors that Google is about to roll out a new version of Gmail, that might change...

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 3, 2007 11:06 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Maybe searching is fast, but when I have to use webmail, I always found the latency too big. I mean, webmails are just way too slow to e.g. open a message.

Bye,NAR