Okay, now it is official that there are at least a good 8 Million Firefox 3 users (as of June 17) and counting. (The number is being quoted as per the Firefox Download day figures available here) So proud to see India in the 500K plus region. And nothing can be better when your favorite browser wants to get cozy with your favorite mail. [Continue Reading]
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With the launch of the GMail Labs last week, GOOG has already started rolling out the first set of what Labs has to offer. To enable Labs, go to Settings, and then the Labs Tab. You’ll get a list of the available tweaks and all you need to do is enable them as you wish. GMail Blog has given the description of a few of them. I am including the ones not mentioned in the Blog.
1.Fixed Width Font: Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font.
2. Highly Recommended: Mouse Gestures: Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows.
Screenshot after the jump, click to expand. [Continue Reading]
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GMail has been on a roll with its continuous enhancements and additions to its ever-existent good value. Sounds like I’m selling it to you and Google is paying me to do it. LOL. No. GMail IS the preferred free mail service of the geeks (which means pretty much the world of internet for me). Frankly, I hardly see anyone using the annoying, heavier,taking-more-time-to-load and the graphically extravagant Yahoos and Live inboxes. And then, when you think that GOOG has done it all, they come up with IMAP integration. Unlike the normal notion, it has NOTHING to do with Apple and the I in IMAP is in CAPITAL LETTERS. Right, so we did have POP before for GMail integration with your mobile mail accessing device ( smart phones, PDAs, Blackberry et al, oh yeah I wouldn’t forget the iPhone with the small ‘i’). But what was annoying there was that, the read mails in your device/Mail Client didn’t reflect in the actual inbox when you access it from your laptop/workstation (another politically correct statement-which spans across PC-typically Windows users, Linux users and Mac users). Not anymore.
Enter IMAP. The two way communication path. In the words of Sze-jun Tsai from the GMail Blog ;
A two-way communication path (IMAP). Unlike with POP, your devices talk back to our servers and sync your changes automatically with IMAP. When you sign in to your Gmail account in a web browser, actions you’ve taken on your email client or mobile device (like putting a message in a ‘work’ folder) will also appear in Gmail (your message will already have a ‘work’ label on it). This all happens automatically once you set up IMAP, so you don’t have to read or sort all your mail twice. This is really helpful when accessing Gmail from multiple devices.
Now, besides the obvious advantage of synchronising the usage of GMail across your portable device and your not-so portable device, there are some more added features. Like, the ability to use filters and Labels, and yes, the changes are synchronised over all accessible points of GMail. That means, if you create a label name in your Thunderbird, it would be visible on your Inbox on your laptop, as well as your Blackberry/iPhone-saving you irritation and time.
Setting up IMAP is as easy as 1, 2,3..Follow the simple steps below.
1.Sign in to GMail, go to Settings, Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP and Enable IMAP.
2.Configure your IMAP client.
3.Save changes. 
4th invisible step: Moonwalk with a Happy face. LOL.
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Our older friendly GMail gave us a new user mail experience compared to the other services that were available. Firstly, it concentrated on one important point and that was- Mail. Inbox is all about how simple and fast we can load the inbox and get to our mails. Not some fancy graphic flashing on the top or some widget loading on and on and on. But with the new version of GMail, we have been encountering certain problems. For example, in sending attachments, or open large mails, or mails with image links etc. We have all seen the irritating message ” This is taking longer than usual”. I even faced other problems like my Chat becoming disabled all of a sudden, or the other error message ” System encountered an error”.
The New GMail Blog post assures GMail users to not face the above mentioned problems anymore and even feel an enhanced user experience. According to the post by Wiltse Carpenter, GMail’s load time has seen a 20% reduction compared to when they started the service. Hmm, hard to believe. But I would like to. Anyway, the technical details of how the reduction of performance time has been implemented is given on the blog. Although, I would like to include an excerpt of it.
We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site’s home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.
So did they finally achieve it? Find out on the blog.
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Shaking 9e3k
