Gmail (26 Apr 2004)

Experiment possibly discounts Many Worlds and Copenhagen interpretations.

Frankly, wow. Gmail is very cool. In fact I possibly prefer it to mutt, my usual mailreader - but give me a couple of days before I pronounce on that.

Gmail is the first web application that actually deserves the name. For example, the inbox page has 2 lines of HTML, all the rest looks like:

D(["qu","0 MB","1000 MB","0%","#006633"]

Basically, there's a master Javascript page which parses all that and spits out HTML, client side. That also means that the interface is very fast for the most part. A round-trip to the gmail server takes a while as ever (<1 second) but many operations are just javascript. And the vi key bindings 'j', 'k' and '/' work