Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app... | Hacker News

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		_fwu1 on March 16, 2021 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innov... Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app. Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser. It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.

SahAssar on March 16, 2021 [–]

For historical context: XMLHttpRequest was invented for outlook web access, so the idea and usecase preceded gmail.

astrange on March 17, 2021 | [–]

The first time I saw it was in Google's Orkut, their first failed social network. But it did have cool AJAX.

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