undefined | Better HN

0 pointsasiachick6y ago0 comments

Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost

It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail)

And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web

In fact I'm pretty sure that's why Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

0 comments

airstrike6y ago

Outlook Web Access is absolute horseshit compared to OG gmail. Sure, it was JS-driven, but it wasn't good.

The apps you mentioned had nowhere near the impact that Gmail had in terms of showing what was possible

omegabravo6y ago

GMail had a massive impact, but I didn't really think it was novel from a technical JS perspective. It was really basic, and loaded fast. It had excellent fast search and very good junk mail rejection.

Most email providers had approximately 100Mb mailbox limit (I can't remember specifically), but Gmail had 1Gb.

city416y ago

To me it was Maps in 2005 that really showcased what JS could do.

wolco6y ago

It was novel to release gmail at that scale in javascript. It hasn't been done before. 1Gb was a crazy size.

Anybody remember gmail invites?

4 more replies

chc6y ago

I don't think many people knew about Oddpost, whatever it was, so it seems a bit suspect to say it influenced a lot of developers' perceptions of JavaScript.

lowercased6y ago

As someone who was doing web development at that time (since '96 actually), oddpost did have an impact on perception of JS and what was possible among developers. Yahoo buying them was kind of a big deal at the time, and every developer I knew who was involved in web stuff had seen it or at least heard about it.

The biggest drawback at the time was that it was window/IE only, and when gmail was released, google made an effort to be cross-platform.

IMO, Google's 'big win' wasn't so much showing what JS could do, but that complex JS could be done cross-browser and cross-platform.

trustfundbaby6y ago

Never heard of oddpost, and pretty sure most devs at the time had never either. I do remember Gmail really being a wow moment with respect to Javascript and specifically AJAX though.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse