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Nice integration of IM into Yahoo Mail
Comments(6)
I saw that the new Yahoo Mail had integrated IM functionality and thought, well, that’s nice. This morning I tried it and I have to say it’s actually quite useful.
I’m an IM client polygamist, using the normal Yahoo IM client, trillian, or Meebo, depending on the mood and/or machine I’m using.
Two of the machines I regularly use are underpowered and groan under pressure. Even better, I travel a lot and have limited bandwidth via a Verizon Wireless EVDO card. This has made me very CPU and bandwidth conscious.
This morning I’m running Eclipse, a couple of local web servers, and various other things, so I thought I’d go with Meebo to run one less process. I also opened another tab with Yahoo Mail to check email.
Well, the combined AJAX goodness of those sites was just too much for my poor browser, sending it into a catatonic freeze. I watched my CPU at 100% for 2 minutes and finally hard-killed the firefox process.
On take 2 I decided to check email first and then get on IM. That’s when I noticed the IM integration in Yahoo Mail and gave it a try.
I’m using it right now and it’s really not bad. The contact list appears in the left panel for easy access. Each conversation gets its own tab. It’s responsive and even shows when the other person is typing.
So that’s one less desktop app to run, one more step towards the firefox computer, one less Web app to run, and a good reason to keep Yahoo Mail open as a permanent window in Firefox.
Yes, but what are you going to do with all that AJAX screaming in the Yahoo mail window? My wife has a habit of leaving her computer with her yahoo mail up and when I get to the computer hours later, there is usually a message from the system on the screen and it says “Kill me, please”
LOL – kill me, please.
Actually, I have to agree – there is too much AJAX on that page. It puts a big burden on the browser. I have changed my habits – I used to leave the mail page open all the time, but now I log in only when I’m notified of new email, and close it shortly after.
We either need a better/faster/leaner JavaScript engine in the browsers, or we need leaner use of AJAX.
I think we need both.
life used to be much easier when i didn’t have to change my (end user) behavior to accommodate changes to a *web* application like this or having to play around with the cache size on the browser. either way the user is forced to trade in something because the web application got changed. Yahoo mail is not alone. Now I’m very careful to close pages and tabs (on firefox) when I’m absolutely done with a page.
What I don’t want to do is to leave the browser up and than come back and find out that it’s quicker just to force a “kill” on the browser than to wait for it to finish the data fetch/transfers. there is actually stuff there in other tabs that I hate navigating to again.
i’m not suer what causes this for Yahoo mail but too many times careless and excessive use of xmlhttprequest calls with huge data transfers is the root cause of this.
Mehdi, I didn’t know you have a blog. Subscribed. Do you have a personal one as well?
nope.. no personal blog, although watching and reading the news outlets these days (even supposedly somewhat credible ones like CCN and the NY Times) has given me the urge to start a personal blog and just remind myself of the difference between reporting and expressing opinion, that become “facts”. I guess lots of folks are trying to “keep up with the Joneses” in the news business.
for now the sun blog is the only one i have and I haven’t been that good at keeping up with it.. next, you can watch my opinion about Amazon S3 service.
Check out http://www.koolim.com