As I was writing my column yesterday for Blogging Tips, something dawned on me. That as much as I love Gmail, there aren’t many alternatives out there.

I wondered aloud on Twitter why there were no viable competitors for Gmail and got a slew of good responses. One of the best came from user @lance_ who said that “It takes a lot of market clout or money to get past spam filters. There isn’t a huge market for b2b & consumers already got an address.” (fixed quote for tweet-speak).

Others seemed to feel that the market was saturated while others still were quick to remind me about Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, neither of which really hold much of a candle to Gmail in terms of features. When you consider that Gmail, for free, offers nearly unlimited space, free IMAP access, threading, powerful search, good spam filtering and more, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail look like weaklings.

Gmail is pretty much the undisputed champion right now, at least in terms of features and power, and, sadly, there is no real competition on the horizon. Yahoo! and Microsoft seem to have rolled over and other companies, like Zenbe, would rather build off of Gmail than create something truly new.

The result is that Gmail has stagnated. What was revolutionary when it was first created has slowed to a crawl. Most of the “Labs” features are either mistakes that should never have been in Gmail, such as Signature Tweaks, Title Tweaks, etc. or outright catchup with other systems, such as Canned Responses.

Gmail, which is still in beta, hasn’t blossomed and though it seems to announce new features regularly, most seem outright trivial. So where’s the competition to keep the fire hot? Where is the upstart company with a bold new vision and a competing ideal? It isn’t there.

It’s time for some competition. Time for an upstart group of rebels to really attack this issue and see what they can do. Will it be easy? No. Is it impossible? Maybe. But the future of email may depend on it.

Love for Gmail

The main reason that no one seems to have taken on this issue is because most people seem to really love their Gmail. And why not? It’s fast, its search is great, the threaded conversation feature works really well, its spam filtering is top-notch and you even get free IMAP access if you prefer to use Outlook or Thunderbird.

Gmail is, for all intents and purposes, warm buttery email goodness. I use it, my friends use it, most people I talk to use it. Everyone loves their Gmail and with good reason.

But this undying devotion to Gmail is dangerous. Sure, Gmail is great today, but is having only only one serious email provider really a good thing? Sure, Yahoo! and Hotmail both have more subscribers, but among those that take email serious, Gmail is the undisputed king and the devotion, no matter how deserved, is rabid.

To be honest and fair, Gmail got where it did by revolutionizing the way we did email back in 2004/2005. In a time where storage in Webmail services was measured in MB and deleting mail a common problem, Gmail came on the scene with GBs of storage, threaded conversations and a slick new interface. It took our current Webmail services and made them look puny and dated, even before most of us had access to Gmail.

But after its initial innovations it really hasn’t done that much. Most of the changes have been tweaks, fixes and minor improvements. Gmail became famous for its broad strokes but has, in the past four years or so, done nothing but fix some of the details.

The only broad stroke was to enable IMAP access for all accounts, a great feature, but one that has nothing to do with the Web interface. In fact, it was more of an escape for those who didn’t like what Gmail was bringing.

The kick to the stomach there though is that there hasn’t been much good done with email clients in the last five years either. Even Thunderbird has had its development stagnate, especially when compared to Firefox.

As great as Gmail is, if you find yourself dissatisfied for any reason, you’re pretty much out of luck. There are no viable replacements right now and Google is coding like they know it.

The Internet Explorer Problem

Though it is hard to imagine, there was a time when using Internet Explorer was actually cool. When it was first introduced, it was free, powerful and way ahead of Netscape, its main rival. It took market share away, inch by inch, and eventually became a de facto monopoly.

But that was when things got ugly. IE, for the most part, didn’t bother doing anything. It reached the top of the mountain and, since it wasn’t making Microsoft any money, it got treated like an unwanted stepchild.

The result was bad for the Web in every way. Though having a free and powerful browser was, at first, a good thing, it became a nightmare as Microsoft flouted Internet standards, ignored browser innovations (IE: tabbed browsing) and generally made life Hell for developers and users alike.

It wasn’t until a serious challenger, namely Firefox, came along that they began to wake up and release new versions. It’s no coincidence that a two-year release cycle stretched into 5 beginning with the release of IE 6 in 2001, roughly when IE reached the pinnacle of its market share, and that IE7 would be the one to introduce tabbed browsing, years after it had been in other browsers.

The end result was that, by introducing competition, Firefox improved the Web for everyone, including IE users.

Though I’m not saying Google is going to be as flagrant in ignoring Gmail as Microsoft was with IE, but its a simple fact that any company interested in the bottom line isn’t going to spend as much money developing something they already have a solid lead in. If there are no good threats, there’s no motivation to innovate.

In short, Gmail may be so good, that it’s bad for email.

So Where Are the Startups?

So where are these companies that can light a fire under Google? Well, I think the market may be to blame.

The problem is five-fold:

1. Market Saturation: Virtually everyone that wants an email address has one and most of us have several. Any new email system would first have to convince people to move their data over to their service, thus opening up a whole new series of headaches.
2. Startup Capital: There’s a good reason the biggest webmail systems are provided by large companies, it’s because it takes a lot of money to run one. Server costs, personnel, support, spam filtering, etc. It takes a lot more than a good front end to make a good Webmail provider and that makes it costly to run.
3. Poor Monetization: The only way to earn revenue from webmail is to either charge for pro accounts or sell ads. Gmail killed the first business model and, well, good luck with the second, in this economy especially.
4. Email Isn’t Cool: Email may be necessary, but it is so last decade. Developers and startups today want to do rich media, microblogging, social networking, instant messaging and anything with an API. As important as email is, it doesn’t get many people excited anymore.
5. Trust Factor: How is a new startup going to get users to trust them enough with all of their data AND a business-critical application? I have no idea. Any solution will have to come from an established, reputable company.

In the end, it may be that the door has been shut on email-based startups. Though some, like Postbox, are building products and services to work with Gmail, no one seems to be ready to go against it.

It’s a love fest with Gmail and it’s only a matter of time until the big “G” gets bored with the relationship.

Bottom Line

I hope that we don’t have to wait for Gmail to bottom out the way IE did before we see some competition. It would be sad to see that the move to create an alternative would be motivated more out of anger rather than a simple desire for choice.

Gmail is great, but it may be too awesome for its own good. We all need a little conflict to stay on our game and companies need it even more.

Someone out there has to have a great idea for making email faster/easier/better, so I say we hear it. If someone doesn’t try, we may be waltzing right into an email dark age.

Update: See comments below for a response from Omni Group The OmniWeb Web browser is, for the most part, no more. Though the announcement last week highlighted the fact that it was now available for free, the buried lead is that they are stopping active development on the browser. Though they aren’t ruling out future updates, they aren’t promising any either and they didn’t open source the browser. With the browser wars the way they are, that’s as good as a death sentence.

However, most people that used OmniWeb seemed to like the browser. I tried it several times over the past few years, never quite getting to the point where I was willing to pay for it after the trial ended. Sadly though, the browser couldn’t build any real traction. Many Mac users were unaware it was available and, those that did, seemed to always go back to free browsers.

It was, and still is, a fairly innovative browser and one that works fairly well. Based on Webkit, it’s a fast browser with an intersting “tabs on the side” system that uses thumbnails of pages rather than a traditional tab bar. It also has a slew of built-in features, such as ad-blocking, workspaces and individual site preferences.

Yet, the browser is clearly being put into retirement. Where did it go wrong and how can other “deep in the pack” browsers, such as Flock and Opera, avoid a similar fate?

The Business Model

When it comes to determining why OmniWeb is sliding out the exit, many are going to instantly point to the business model for the browser. It was, until the announcement, a paid browser in a field of freebies. Though the price was low, fifteen dollars, it was definitely a barrier to entry.

That being said, I don’t think it’s that simple. In fact, if there has ever been a time for a paid browser to succeed, this is it.

Think about it. The browser is now more integral to our lives than ever. Where five years ago it was a fancy box to look at Web pages, now it’s a mail client, an office suite, a publishing platform and more. Where once a browser was just a commodity, now it is an integral part of our work experience. Where once we could “make do” with any browser, now a good one is a necessity.

The problem with selling a browser is that there are so many good ones out there for free. Between IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock and so forth, there is a wide selection of good (or in the case of IE, ‘meh’) browsers that can do what most users need and either come installed with the OS or can be freely downloaded. Furthermore, if you want to sell a browser, you aren’t just competing with Firefox, IE, etc. but all of the add-ons and plugins created for them.

That’s a tough sell to say the least but it can be done. If you can bring something new, powerful and compelling to the table, you can probably sell it. If you can make the browser more useful and more powerful for how people use the Web today, there may be a market for selling copies.

In the meantime though, it seems that the “free browser, split search revenue” model for the browser is going to remain the focus. It’s made the non-profit Mozilla Organization a ton of cash and seems to be keeping Flock afloat, even with barely six million users.

Though the business model may have contributed to OmniWeb’s problems, I don’t it was the sole cause of the browser’s lack of traction. I think the browser had, and continues to have, bigger problems.

The Bigger Missteps

In my experience using OmniWeb, I noticed that I would use the browser almost exclusively for the whole 30-day trial but, when it expired, I could never quite bring myself to turning over my credit card. It wasn’t the price itself that bothered me, just a difficulty justifying the purchase. Thinking back, I see why I had the problems I did.

1. Not Innovative Enough: Though Omniweb did try to bring something new to the browser, its most obvious feature, the tab sidebar, could be easily replicated using a single extension for Firefox. It’s hard to convince me to pay for something that is available for free so trivially.
2. Stability: The Omni Group does a great job building software that doesn’t leak memory or slow down computers. Omniweb is no different. However, it does seem to crash at semi-regular intervals for me. It’s not an “all the time” problem that was a deal breaker, but a few times a week it would go down completely, even Safari 4 beta seems to be more stable.
3. Poor Feature Parity: Though the Firefox extension system is something of an inelegant solution when it comes to adding needed features, some of the extensions do add very compelling elements. Though OmniWeb attempted to add some of the more popular features back in, they were poor substitutes. Ad blocking in OmniWeb, for example, was a poor substitute for AdBlockPlus.

In short, OmniWeb, as a paid browser, did not offer anything that was compelling enough to get me to pay for it. In fact, even with it being free, its unlikely that I’ll use it as my main browser.

How to Sell a Browser

As I said above, it isn’t that I think one can’t offer a browser for sale and make money, it’s that Omni Group didn’t do it well enough. This is largely likely caused by the fact that, by their own admission, they are a small company and didn’t have the resources to really build the browser they needed to. They are right to shift their focus to other, more lucrative, apps.

So how would one build a browser for sale? Here’s my suggestions:

1. Come Packing: If your browser comes with a price tag, it needs to come with some kick-ass features. It needs to be so unique and so powerful that other browsers struggle, through hacks and extensions to get something resembling it. It needs to offer unique, compelling features and be the fastest, most stable browser available. Difficult? Yes. But not impossible.
2. Target Power Users: This may seem obvious, since power users are the ones most likely to pay for a browser, but OmniWeb screwed this one up. Most of the features of OmniWeb were targeted at the ease-of-use crowd and not the “need to write four blog posts and check my Gmail” crowd.
3. Rethink the Browser: As I’ve noted before, the Web browser has not changed much in the past ten years or so. The earliest browsers look and function much like the current ones. If you’re going to charge for your browser, it needs to shake things up and not just follow the leader. Being genuinely better will mean doing something radically different that not everyone will like. However, those who do like it will like it enough to pay you money.

The bottom line is that, if you’re going to charge for a browser, it isn’t enough that it be a solid one, which OmniWeb is, it has to be clearly superior, at least to a certain group, and one that other browsers strive to be like.

Bottom Line

The question isn’t whether anyone can sell a browser and make a profit, it is whether someone will invest the time, resources and energy into making it work. It’s going to take more than what Omni Group was able to muster for its browser. Other companies that used to charge for their browser, such as Opera, have also switched to other business models for much the same reason.

But these failures are not due to a market that won’t pay, they are due to the fact that OmniWeb, like Opera, was never able to distinguish itself clearly enough from free alternatives to justify any price tag. Though many feel OmniWeb was the superior browser on Mac, very few felt it was superior enough to justify opening their wallet.

Anyone who wants to sell a browser has a tall mountain to climb and there’s no shame in failing, Opera has done great things with the free model, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be climbed and, as the browser becomes more and more the hub of all our computer activities, that opportunity will only grow.

Of course, as the free alternatives improve, the challenge of getting consumers to open their wallets will only become greater over the years.

In short, if someone’s going to do it, it is now or never…

Though the Web browser has grown in importance and changed drastically in function since the first version of Netscape Navigator ruled a fledgling Web, its interface has not changed that drastically.

Though tabbed browsing introduced an important new element, most browsers sport forward and back buttons along with stop/reload buttons, an address bar and, more recently, a search box. Most browsers today look enough like Netscape Navigator 0.91 that few would be lost if they traveled back in time.

But lately there has been an attempt to shake that up some. First came Google Chrome, introducing the idea of tabs on top, and now comes the new beta of Safari 4, which adds even more new interface changes.

Though I’m always a fan of innovation, there’s a lot about these interface changes that bug me and not just the new “bug report” button. I’m admittedly no interface designer, but there are a lot of things that I would definitely do differently…

Just to be Clear

I want to make it clear that I really do like most of what I see in Safari 4. It’s a solid browser over all, especially for Mac users. I like how fast JavaScript moves on it, I like the new “Top Sites” feature and the way it is presented, I like the use of coverflow and I like the overall stability and speed. For doing the things that a browser does, it’s great.

The problems I have are isolated with the interface and some of the changes they’ve made since version 3 and even apart from the latest Webkit nightlies. They seem to have taken a serious departure from the standards of browser interface design and, though I have to admire their daring, it seems they’ve made a few missteps.

Specifically, there are two problems that have me unnerved.

Tabs on Top… Way on Top

When Google Chrome introduced the idea of moving the tab bar to top of the browser, it was a controversial move. I, personally, don’t like tabs on top because it is an ineffeciency for me. Look at this example.

As you can see, if I want to get my cursor from where it is locate to click on a tab, I have to go over not just where the tab bar should have been (the red box) but over the bookmark toolbar and address toolbar. This not only doubles the mouse distance for this very short move, but puts my most common mouse action farther away from where my mouse usually is. Most uses, for me, of the address and/or search boxes are through a command+t to open a new tab and then using the tab key to access the needed box.

However, I can’t begrudge Safari that as Chrome did indeed start it and it does have the benefit of giving one more room in the browser pane. Where Safari went wrong was having the tab bar also double as the title bar of the Window in both Windows and OSX. This is taking a weak idea and making it downright stupid.

The title bar is a crucial part of the Window. It’s how you interact with that particular window on your desktop, including minimizing, shading, closing and moving it. Now it also has to play the role of tab bar? This means you have to be able to open, close and reorder tabs tool. That puts no fewer than 7 major functions in one very narrow strip of screen real estate.

To make this work, Safari added a new convention. In Firefox or Safari 3, if you wanted to drag a tab, you just clicked anywhere on the tab and dragged it, easy. With Safari 4, click and dragging a tab blindly grabs the whole window. Instead, you have to grab the three diagonal lines on the right hand side of the tab to move it around. It’s another convention to learn and adapt to.

Is it minor? Perhaps. It isn’t the worst thing I’ve seen (anyone tried using the latest version of Microsoft Office?), but I don’t see any reason to crowd the title bar with tab functions when it hardly saves any screen real estate at all and seems to open the door to a lot of mistakes.

The Reload Button

Real fast. On the screenshot above, find the reload button. Trick question. It isn’t in that screenshot.

The reload button is actually IN the address bar, the same way the RSS icon usually is.

it was bad enough when IE7 moved the reload button to the other side of the address bar, now Safari has to find a whole new place that no one will think to look for it. I grant that it is not a button that is commonly used and I agree with combining it with the “stop” button, if you need one you definitely don’t need the other, but it is it so rarely used that we need to play hide and seek with it?

The reload button is an important part of the browser for many people. I use it refresh statistics of keep on top of Twitter if I’m not in my Tweetdeck or to keep my email fresh if Gmail is acting funny. I don’t use it often but when I need it I don’t want to go hunting for it.

This is another classic case of change just for change’s sake. The nagivation bar has never been particularly crowded or cluttered and moving the reload button to the end of the address bar just necessitates that the address bar be longer and adds more buttons to the end of it, not actually cleaning anything up. Worse still, any gain is lost with the addition of the bug report button at the far right.

Because, you know, there’s a button I’m going to use a dozen times a day. At least I can remove it with “Customize Toolbar”.

Things that Still Suck

With that in mind, there are still a few issues I have with Safari that have been around since version 3 and beyond that I was hoping they’d fix with version 4 but, so far, no luck.

1. One Window Mode: Why is it that I am constantly closing windows when I supposedly have pop ups blocked? Gmail links open in new windows as do any links have that designation. The problem is that, with Firefox, new window secretly means new tab, as it should be. With tab browsing there is NO REASON to have two windows.
2. Tab Overflow: Tab overflow still sucks. You now get a “…” and you can click on that to get the full tab list but you have to close enough tabs to fit in your window before you can rearrange latter tabs. Firefox overflow management isn’t perfect, but a lot better.
3. Favicons: Seriously? No favicons in tabs? You have to be kidding me. It is almost impossible to tell, at a glance, what is in which tab and, when you combine that with the ways tabs get compressed it is a real mess. You don’t even have to sacrifice screen real estate, just make them double as the close buttons on hover.

These are just a few of the UI decisions with Safari that I have a beef with that haven’t been fixed. Though the new version 4 is an improvement in almost every way, it takes the existing UI problems and magnifies them all many times over.

Say Something Nice

Real fast, since my mother would not be happy that I haven’t said anything nice about the new UI, I do have a few words of praise.

Here are a few new things that I actually do appreciate:

li>Tab Highlighting: One of the problems with Safari 3 was that it was almost impossible to see what tab you’re in. All of them looked about the same. With 4 that problem is gone. The tab you’re in has a noticeably different tint to it and the tab itself is wider. A pretty slick way of handling the problem.
1. Top Site Interface: This is a bit of cheat since it is only new because the feature is new, but managing the top site feature is very slick. I ended up making mine all pushpins since my browsing history is too thin to be of much help to it (I switch browsers too often). You can ban sites from appearing, drag and drop entries and doing so automatically makes them “stickies”. Very intuitive.
2. The “Wonder Bar”: The new address bar functionality is simply superb. If you type in a domain it defaults to taking you to the root, not to some random URL on it. However, if you want said random URL, you can always arrow down. It also is smart enough to pull from both your history and your favorites. Though not quite as smart as Google Chrome’s one bar, it is pretty slick and is a huge leap forward.

Though it seems that most of the interface decisions put this new version of Safari back a ways in usability, there are at least some people on the team who aren’t asleep.

Bottom Line

Me, I like Safari. It’s not a perfect browser and the extension junkies are going to always harp on how you can turn Firefox into everything from a Web development client to a blender. I have nothing against Firefox, but it seems to me that Safari, especially 4, just moves that little bit faster, looks a little cleaner and is a little more gentle on my system. There are a few Firefox extensions I love, but, for most things, Safari gets the job done fine and a bit faster.

However, even as I use Safari 4 to type this, I feel like I’m tolerating the interface. Where once it was one of the draws to the browser, now it is a drawback. If it weren’t for the souped up page loading and JavaScript, I probably would just ignore it and go back to Firefox.

For right now though, I plan on using it. I may switch back in a few days but so far I am pretty happy. I just wish they could get these UI bugs fixed. It might make it a little more bearable to use.

Final Note: Share some of these gripes? Fix them using the commands in this video. (Note: The Reload button is NOT in my Customize Toolbar for some reason. I’ve checked repeatedly).

You see, Twitter has a pretty strange definition for what constitutes a reply. It is perfectly possible to type @username and not have Twitter realize that you’re talking to that person. If they’re checking on the Web site or a weak Twitter client, they might never see your message.

The “bug” is that Twitter only tracks replies if the message BEGINS with the @reply. So unless the “@” is the first character in the tweet and the username is the first one replied to, Twitter doesn’t see it as a reply.

This set up defies both the way we communicate as human beings and how people use Twitter. That, in turn, has led to some pretty inelegant solutions to get around the problem.

An Example Conversation

Let’s say I’m in a room talking with three other people. We have my wife, Crystal, her friend Liz and my neighbor Tony (why the four of us would be talking could be the subject of many “walked into a bar” jokes). The four of us are all talking at the same time but not necessarily to everyone in the group, we are just in each others presence.

At one point I grab Crystal and say “Crystal, what do you think of my shoes?”

That, in Twitter, would equal this: “@Crystal What do you think of my shoes?” This, in turn, works pretty well, Crystal gets it as an @reply and all works as planned.

But what if I want to ask the question to her and Liz: “Crystal and Liz, what do you think of my shoes?”

Translated into Twitter that would be “@Crystal @Liz What do you think of my shoes?”

This is where the problem comes in. Crystal gets the @reply but Liz doesn’t, even though the question was to both of them. However, as far as Twitter knows, I wasn’t asking Liz anything, but merely referencing her. This would be roughly the same as saying “Crystal, what do you think Liz thinks of my shoes?” which is not what I said at all.

So let’s change the question again, I’m asking Crystal and Liz again, but this time about Tony’s shoes. “Crystal and Liz, what do you think about Tony’s shoes?”

Translated into Twitter that would be “@Crystal @Liz What do you think about @Tony shoes?”

Once again, Crystal gets the @reply, Liz doesn’t, though the question was to her as well and @Tony doesn’t get it either, which is debatable as it wasn’t a question to him, though I think he might have a legitimate interest in the response.

Clearly this system isn’t working. Even when you have just four people talking the system breaks totally down. Never mind what happens when you have millions. There has to be a better way.

Referencing vs. Replying

The problem is simple, for Twitter, if a tweet begins with @username, then it is a reply. If it has the @username anywhere else, it merely references them. To view all of the actual replies you get, you have to either subscribed to a twitter search for @username or use a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck or Twhirl that has worked around that issue and reports all @ mentions as replies.

But even with this hack-ish solution, it is still a broken system, at least when compared to what Twitter thinks it should mean. It either all-on or all-off. Either I reply to everyone, even those that I just want to reference, or I only reply to the first person on the list. There needs to be a solution.

What we need is a way to actually distinguish between the people we are talking to and those we are talking about. Since we already have a hashtag system, why not use a variation of that to distinguish when we are talking about people?

The simplest solution would be to use #username to say when we are talking about someone. However, that will run into problems as there are many Twitter users with names similar to existing hashtags. So, if you had a pretty common username, it wouldn’t work.

Then we have two options, one would be to use another symbol, such as an “&” or “*”. The other would be to use the hash with the @ system. For example, #@username.

The former system would require some re-learning on the part of Twitter users and the latter one would eat up a precious character each time one wanted to do it.

But then comes the hard question. How often do we really reference someone without wanting them to see it? Most of the time it is when we are encouraging others to follow another person or contact them. Is it terrible that they would know about those conversations?

If we assume that, then the simplest solution is to go back to the beginning and just have Twitter acknowledge all uses of the @ symbol as an @reply and then everyone carry on as is. The worst that will happen is that some people will occasionally get replies that weren’t really to them, but about them, and that they probably wanted to see anyway.

Going back to my final example, “@Crystal @Liz What do you think about @Tony shoes?” I think it’s reasonable to say that Tony would be very interested in that tweet (depending on how much he cared about his shoes) and even though it wasn’t actually to him, he would want to see it. As for me, Crystal and Liz, I don’t think any of us should be offended that he did. Not unless we’re talking about him behind his back…

However, that’s what direct messages are for…

Bottom Line

If Twitter is to be our new method of online conversation, it isn’t going to become that by breaking the established rules of dialog. Twitter needs to find ways to adapt the way we talk natural to its 140 character world, not try to redefine everything.

This is something that would, theoretically, be a very simple fix for Twitter to implement and it remains unclear why they have failed to do so. As such, retweets, @replies to more than one person and incorrectly formatted @replies never reach their destination without some hacking.

It’s a simple fix, the question is whether Twitter will actually admit it was wrong in this area…

Now I am the first to admit that blog commenting right now sucks. When a company like CoComment, which does a mediocre job at best, can earn a living just by tracking and seeking updates on the comments you post across the Web, there is a serious problem. Users have a lot of reasons to prefer centralized commenting tools as having two or three commenting accounts beats checking dozens of sites for updates.

But what about bloggers? What do we get out of the deal? Though I’ve kept Disqus here on IS for some time, on PT I’ve been bouncing around from comment solution to comment solution trying to figure out what is best for my blog. I’ve tried nearly every service out there and the only conclusion I’ve reached is that no one, repeat no one, really wants my comments.

That is, at least not bad enough to create a truly compelling service…

Good People, Bad Products

Before I begin the rant, I want to take a moment and say that I’ve had interactions with people at all of these services. Every time I have talked with someone at Intense Debate, Disqus and JS-Kit, it has been a wonderful experience. They have very helpful people on their teams that bend over backwards for their customers. It’s great customer service.

The problem is that, despite all of this wonderful service, the products inevitably fall flat. It’s like having a five-star waiter serve you McDonald’s. No matter how much you dress it up, no matter how enthusiastic your staff and hardcore fans are, it’s still just ground beef.

What are my gripes? Well, let’s take the services one at a time. Each has their own unique pattern of fail.

Poor Disqus. Of all the three I’m mentioning, they seem to be the best right now. Even though Automattic purchased Intense Debate, Disqus manages to both provide the best features and continuously out-innovate everyone else. The problem is that they are victims of their own success. They’ve been bit by the spam bug, hard.

Even though this blog doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of comments of PT or other sites I work for, it gets many times the comment spam and most it is traced back to Disqus’ inability to filter. Though they’ve promised to deal with these issues, there has been a spam problem for a very long time. It has just merely ramped up in the recent weeks.

The biggest gripe is that Disqus will often email you even when it has caught a spam comment, turning comment spam into email spam. Smooth.

ID has managed to keep the comment spam issue under control, but has managed to place head squarely up ass when it comes to customer wishes. Facebook Connect usability is by far the most requested feature on their Get Satisfaction forum, getting more than 2 times the number of comments than any other suggestion. So what do they do? They refuse to make it a priority and instead say that it is “currently not on our dev list.”

Never mind that Disqus, JS-Kit and even standalone WordPress (with plugins) have this ability. ID is now dead last in terms of features (if you value Facebook Connect) and seems content to stay there. Way to listen to your customers…

I could never really get JS-Kit to work right on my site so I can’t offer any good gripes. Importing the old comments required me to email the entire WordPress XML file to them, which in turn necessitated putting it on a hidden URL since it was too big to attach, and the commenting system, once set up, didn’t seem to work right.

Where ID and Disqus are both real “set and forget” it seems JS-Kit takes a lot of work to make it look and feel right. That’s not a bad thing, but the instructions aren’t clear and the speed bumps in getting set up made me wary about investing too much time in the service.

I installed it, set it up, found that the comments did not work anywhere near as nicely as I wanted (though on other JS-Kit blogs it does look better) and turned it off almost immediately. I appreciate the help that they gave me, but it was going to clearly be a long road and I wasn’t ready for it right then. Plus it seems they’ve had some reliability issues lately.

What I Want

I don’t think I’m a hard person to please, but I do have seven things I want from whoever hosts my comments. Some of these are “solved” problems, but others are features no one is offering:

1. Easy Setup: I should be able to install the plugin, provide my login information and have the system up and running with just some minor tweaking.
2. Attractive User Experience: The experience, from the commenter’s perspective, should be very attractive and almost seamless. Bonus points for making me like looking at the admin panel as well.
3. Good Spam Filtering: Give me good spam filtering, hold the CAPTCHAs. I won’t think less of you if you use Akismet. I’ll think you’re smart.
4. Import & Syncrhonization: Your service should import my existing comments and then synchronize everything with my WordPress database. If your company goes under tomorrow, I don’t want to miss a beat.
5. That Includes Replies: Remember, since 2.7 WordPress supports comment replies, I expect those to be imported and maintained. No reason my comments should become unthreaded when I switch systems.
6. Facebook/OpenID Integration: Let me use Facebook Connect to post a comment. This lets my comment form reach a whole new audience and helps both encourage feedback and promotion of the site. Likewise, show some love for OpenID and other login systems.
7. Video/Audio Comments: Granted, no one has actually left a video or audio comment on one of my sites, but it’s a nice feature to have and there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more of this in the future.

If you can do those seven things, keep your service reasonably reliable/fast and provide some good customer service, I’ll probably jump ship.

I’m not that hard to please, I just want it all.

Bottom Line

Right now I’m sticking with Disqus. I’m sure my readers on PT are tired of the repeat changes and, since IS is already on Disqus it seems like a good place to keep it for now. Though I hope they can improve their spam filtering, at least it has most of the features I need and good reliability.

I don’t know if I’d call this an “endorsement” of Disqus, but it is at least the service I have the least to gripe about.

But be warned, once WordPress gets Facebook integration built in or the plugins for it become a little bit less flaky, I’ll likely be moving back to my own comment system. That is, unless Disqus (or someone else) can really WOW me before that happens…

I love you guys, I really do. Your search is top notch, your Gmail/Google Apps is a killer product and even you Google Reader is the best RSS reader I’ve found, online or off. You guys have a knack for producing exciting, reliable products that change the way we use information.

However, I do have one tiny favor to ask you. One small, minuscule request. Can you please stop buying up companies of products that I use? If so, that would be great. Because I’m really getting tired of you screwing up the things that were going along great without you.

If you have any questions about this request, I politely direct you to the article below. It will answer many of your queries and give my reasons for thinking that the Web would be better off if you kept your pocketbook a little closer to your chest.

The Google Problem

Realistically speaking Google has six products that are widely hailed as good and only two where you are dominant. They are.

1. Google Search
2. Google Ads (Adsense/Adwords)
3. Gmail
4. Google Docs
5. Google Reader
6. Google Maps

The problem is that all of these, with the exception of Google Docs, were developed in house for the most part (some did have add ons and extensions that came from other companies). Google made them, tailored them, made sure they were what the people wanted and put them out there. From day one, they were Google’s babies.

Sure, Google has had a few stinkers, Google Answers, Google Notebook, Lively, etc. but they’ve always been able to pull the gems out of their own work.

Unfortunately, when it comes to other people’s products, the ones that they buy, Google seems to do a great job snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Products that were fine and good before they came under the Google banner suddenly start stinking.

Though some products have done fine, YouTube being an example, it is usually because Google keeps them under a separate banner and just runs them as a silent overlord. You get the revenue, they get to keep on as they were before.

Whenever Google tries to “integrate” a product into their fold, it seems that disaster always follows.

A History of Misfires

Before the pod people chase me down and kill me for not joining the Google cult, let’s take a look at a few examples through Google’s history.

1. Dodgeball: Dodgeball was a semi-promising social networking service that used text messaging. Founded in 2000, it was bought by Google in 2005. Two years later, the founders quit in disgust. In a few months, the service will be closed for good.
2. FeedBurner: In 2007, FeedBurner, a very popular feed tracking and serving service, was acquired by Google. Initially the purchase was hailed as Google “liberated” the pro stats program, making it available for free to all. Integration came slow, but when it started within the past few months, almost immediately reliability issues were noticed.
3. Jaiku: Jaiku was a promising microblogging service that was considered a competitor for Twitter. Though it lagged behind Twitter in users, it had an additional features and greater reliability. It seemed poised to make a solid challenge. Google acquired Jaiku in the latter part of 2007 and promptly sat on it, closing it off to sign ups and then eventually deciding to kill it as a public-facing project.

Of course, these are just the obvious flame outs and misfires. This doesn’t even look at Google’s long history of acquiring competitors just to either A) Gain their employees or B) Put down the competition.

Consider this, according to Wikipedia (the source of all truth on the Web), Google has purchased no fewer than four companies that had their products go into Google Docs (or spreadsheets). This includes two different companies that made online presentation software, one word processor and one spreadsheet.

Though Google Docs is a solid product offering, I even listed it as such, did four companies really have to die to make it happen? The problem is that Google recruits talent like a pirate “recruits” treasure. It boards the ship, takes it over, moves the good stuff over to their boat and sinks the old one.

I wouldn’t mind that so much if Google would retain the sense of innovation and creativity that brought these companies to their attention. However, far too often, Google simply buys the companies, hires the people, kills the product or lets it rot in some kind of purgatory.

It isn’t fair to the people that worked to develop the product and it certainly isn’t fair to the people who used and relied on it. Just think of what these four companies could have done if they were still in business and independent today.

Conclusions

In the future, I’m making it my policy to, if I am using a service that Google is acquiring, to get the Hell off of there before it’s too late. If I had left FeedBurner when they first announced the acquisition, I would have had a clear path to leave. Now, it’s not so certain.

I’ll continue to love Google’s native products as well as any acquired ones that remain separate from Google. But for those that Google tries to “integrate” in with its core offerings, I’m likely going to have to say goodbye until the new product proves to be stable and not shut down.

Google has an ugly habit of buying up good Web services and either running them into the ground or integrating them in such a way that the sum of the parts is greater than the new “whole” produced. Fortunately though, it seems Google has slowed down is acquisitions and it might be to the benefit of the Web that Google is feeling the economic pinch. Small, agile companies will be able to grow their ideas without being bought out blindly by the big G.

Though there is certainly nothing wrong with buying up smaller companies and I certainly don’t wish to equate Google with the Microsoft of the 90s, it is clear that not all of Google’s buys have been in the best interest of the Web.

It is most likely time for us to accept that.

But this isn’t to say that Twitter is perfect. Even if we forgive the outages and other technical issues, there are more than a few flaws on this service, issues that sites such as Pownce attempted to exploit, although unsuccessfully.

The truth is that Twitter, by itself, is almost useless. Without the API and applications such as Tweetdeck, I doubt anyone would gain much from it. Even when it is at its best, it is merely an alternative means of socializing and communicating, a steep second place to IM, Email and social networking.

Its advantages are its immediacy and breadth, being something you can use when a blog entry is too slow or an IM too personal. But how can Twitter keep its niche while adding features that its users might actually want. Well, here are my five best suggestions…

5. Better “Follow” Emails

My most common point of contact with Twitter is when the service lets me know when someone follows me. I get these about 12 times a day lately and I’m always excited.

However, that excitement often turns into disappointment. Either it is a spammer, someone who has had their account deleted or just someone I’m not interested in. Sure, I follow the vast majority of people that do follow me, but there are 10-15 percent that I don’t wish to have pop up in my Tweetdeck.

These emails could do a lot more good. How about telling me something about this person? Specifically, I want to know five things.

1. How Many People Are They Following?
2. How Many People Are Following Them?
3. How Many Updates Have They Posted?
4. How Long Have They Been a Member?
5. Other Details (Listed Below)

The end result of all of this is that I would be able to make decisions about whether or not I am likely going to follow the person and, if so, follow up on the site. This works much better than having to visit each account individually and feeling like an idiot.

This would also cut down on the number of spammers on Twitter as fewer people would be clicking through to garbage profiles.

4. Friends in Common

One of my favorite features of Facebook is that it tells me what friends I and a potential connection have in common. I may not know a person directly, but I can see that if we have friends X, Y and Z in common that we likely move in the same circle and need to start talking. It makes sense to add them.

Twitter offers no such tool. Granted, the connections are more loose on Twitter, but they can still be valuable. At least giving me an idea of how many followers we have in common would be a huge help. The only question is how do you judge this? After all, we all have people we follow and people that follow us, two overlapping, but not identical groups. This produces many different ways to count the overlap between two users.

However, I’m sure that the braniacs (snicker) at Twitter can figure out some way to get relevant data from this. They have all of the information about who is connected to who, all they have to do is find a way to make it relevant and present it to us.

3. Friend Categories

I follow about 550 people as of this writing. Among them there are many people I want to follow and respond to, but might not know personally. It would be nice if I could create personal Twitter groups for, example, real-life friends, Web 2.0 gurus, announcement lists, locals, etc.

Right now the Twitter stream is more like a race to grab scoops of random conversation. If there were some segregation in addition to flood, it might make more sense and this would be something that the user controls. It would be a huge assistance to me, especially if the categories were not mutually exclusive.

For example, take my friend Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy). I could put him in my real-life friends category AND my copyright one since he co-hosts my copyright-oriented podcast with me.

Without this, Twitter is difficult to use and it is almost impossible, without separately subscribing to the feeds that you want, to control who you are looking at when you pull up your client.

2. Real Tagging

Tagging conversations on Twitter is a joke. The #system is not a true standard and it takes away from the 140 character limit that goes with each post. As a result, almost no one uses it, even when they are trying to start up a conversation. There is nothing to be gained from using. My few experiments with it have fallen flat.

Twitter needs to take tagging out of the Tweet and offer a real tagging system. I don’t add #plagiarism #copyright to my blog posts, I have a separate place in the header to list them. So it should be with Twitter. Tagging should be severely limited, perhaps to a few dozen characters, but I should not have my message penalized because I want to tag something.

This might require a decent overhaul of the Twitter system, but it could be done pretty easily. It would make the service much more user-friendly and encourage more people to use tagging both for their own posts and for research.

1. Rich Media… Built In

TwitPic, 12seconds, Twiddeo, all of these sites have sprung up for one reason, to put rich media, images and video specifically, into Twitter. A whole cottage industry has sprung up for just this purpose and why? Because Twitter doesn’t have this relatively basic feature built.

This was the one thing that made people actually use Pownce and consider it a serious competitor. Imagine, for a second, if Twitter would make it easy to post images, video or even transfer files without having to go through third party sites.

Would this require an overhaul of the system? Absolutely. But here is the deal. If microblogging is supposed to be the new form of blogging, and regular blogging is becoming more about rich media. If that trend continues, Twitter will be obsolete at the same time it is supposed to be more advanced. This will not last.

Twitter needs to learn to stop worry and start loving rich media.

Conclusions

I’m the first to grant that most of these features can be resolved via the API and some already have. But here’s the problem, when users are relying on third party sites to make your service usable, is that a good thing?

Not only does it add another layer of unreliability, but it also creates security problems considering that one’s Twitter login is passed around the Web. If any one of these services decided to either “go rogue” or were breached by an attacker, countless Twitter users would be at risk and the entire service could be ground to a halt.

When third party sites create features that users feel are essential, it isn’t time to expand the API, it is time to add those features, either through buyout or creation.

That being said, until recently, Dominos is the only pizza place that has had a decent online ordering system. The problem with that being that my local Dominos sucks, being run by the reject cast members of a bad stoner comedy and managed by the evil father from the Twisted Sister music videos (YAY for obscure references), I would almost rather shove pins under my fingernails than set foot inside of there.

When Pizza Hut finally decided to entire the 1990′s and add an online store to their site, I was thrilled. Though my local Pizza Hut is not run much better, at least it gave me a choice and some competition, especially for price.

Though it has been up for a while, I don’t order pizza that often and finally got the chance to give it a try last night. Off the bat, Pizza Hut did everything right. They enticed me with a good deal, lured me to register for the site and even got my information.

The only thing they botched was actually giving me the deal I had clicked on, causing me to leave the site in a huff of anger and a strange hunger for McDonalds.

What happened? Well, let me explain.

The Case of the Disappearing Coupon

When I first visited the Pizza Hut site, I was hungry and broke so I was looking for a good deal. There, on the front page, was an excellent one: A $1 P’zone.

My wife and I had never tried the P’zones and were curious. We like calzones just fine so it seemed like a good meal. Besides, even if it were a buy one, get one for a dollar deal, the two of us would still eat cheaper than if we actually got a pizza.

So I clicked the link and was taken to a second page asking for my address and other information. However, on the left of all this, again, was the exact same ad for the exact same deal. I could almost taste the P’zone goodness already.

I then filled out my information, giving both my address and my zip code over to the Pizza Hut Web Gods and then was taken to their deals page where…

There was no coupon at all.

I scrolled up and down the deals page looking for this deal but it was nowhere to be found. There were all kinds of offers, some of which were also kind of good, but there were no deals at all for the P’zone. I could add them to my shopping cart. But even if I added two I was charged full price.

The end result was that the P’zone deal, advertised two times on the site itself, disappeared after they got my information.

Way to screw the pooch.

Possible Reasons

Thinking about this over the course of the night, I realized that there are three possible reasons that this could have happened.

1. Website Error: It is possible that the deal ended and was just not removed from the front pages. However, this would require not one, but two separate screw ups on the Webmaster’s part and indicate a level of unprofessionalism I commonly associate with investment banks.
2. Deal Not Valid at My Location: The second is that my local restaurant is not honoring that deal so it was removed from my options. However, since my order was carryout, I should have been notified of that and allowed to choose another Pizza Hut that was still close. Who knows? It might have been worth the drive. However, even if the order were delivery, I should have been notified, not just have this nice offer yanked out from underneath me.
3. Bait and Switch: I don’t want to believe that a company like Pizza Hut would engage in such a 9th grade tactics, but it was the end result, regardless of intent. The only problem was that I didn’t buy into it and instead went elsewhere, with a firm promise not to buy from Pizza Hut again until I got an explanation.

On that note, I did file a complaint with Pizza Hut via their comment form and will update this post when and if they respond. However, considering that the error is still there and it has been nearly 24 hours since I contacted them, I am not hopeful. I certainly don’t expect them to bend to my will, but if this were an innocent mistake and I was the first to report it (the latter being HIGHLY unlikely), one would like to think that something would have been done almost immediately.

Bottom Line

For me, the bottom line is simple, online ordering is much more efficient than phone ordering but only if the pizza companies don’t screw it up. Though it makes me weep that Domino’s best customer service is online, it’s a fact of life and, as a result, I’m likely going to keep ordering from there.

That is, until either Papa John’s gets an online ordering system that actually works or Pizza Hut cleans up its mess.

Offline, it is a three-way horserace between the companies, online, it is clear to me that Domino’s owns the pizza-related Web.

Sure, some people swear by Yahoo!’s mail offering. It is pretty and it does deal with some of the issues I address below, but it also doesn’t load on slower connections, has a terrible search function and can’t import email (seriously, are you THAT stupid Yahoo?). Compound that with no IMAP access and a paid account that doesn’t equal Gmail’s free offering, you have a rather distant second at best.

Outside of a few startups that are doing promising things with Web-based email, such as Zenbe, Gmail stands alone. There is no one out there that really competes with Gmail in this area. They were the first to introduce the super-sized mailbox for free, they were the first to use tags not folders on Webmail (Opera did it first in their mail client), they were the first to give free IMAP access and they were the first to actually put one iota of thought into usability.

But can it be better? Damn right. Nothing in the world is immune from improvement, except perhaps Joan Jett, so what can one do to make Gmail just a little more awesome? Here’s my pick of five things that can push it to eleven.

5. Fixing Google Chat

Honestly, I am not sure how I feel about the idea of chat integrated into my Gmail. Sure, I like the idea of all my communications in one place, but as Facebook chat has shown us, Web-based chat is usually a big steaming pile of fail.

However, Gmail chat does a reasonable job but the problem is that it is not a replacement for my existing IM clients. Since I use Adium at work and Digsby at home, there’s no reason to leave the Gmail chat logged in.

If Google chat would gain support for Yahoo!, MSN and other services, it might be able to replace my Adium, remove an application from my desktop and truly unify my communications. Until then, I have to hope that someone ports Spicebird over to the Mac.

4. Google Reader Integration

Though Web Clips was an interesting experiment, it is another case of right idea, wrong execution. I don’t know a single Gmail user that has this feature switched on right now and it is the first thing I disable in any new account I set up (which is actually very rare but that isn’t the point).

The idea of integrating RSS with email is an old one and a good one. Outlook users, for example, have been doing it for years and script authors have been integrating Google Reader into Gmail since at least 2006.

With such a high demand and a logical connection, it is a shame that Google has not done anything officially on this front. The idea of Web Clips is an interesting one, but it is too distracting and completely useless for actually reading RSS feeds.

Time to reboot that idea.

3. API

Google, for the most part, is a pretty open company and Gmail, in most ways, is no exception. There are several ways to allow other applications, including mail clients and Web sites, to access your Gmail contacts and mail so that you can view your information anywhere.

But what about the other direction? What if I wanted to create an application to run inside Gmail? It can be done but most of the methods available right now involve hacking the browser, not Gmail. This defeats much of the advantage of Webmail and it’s “always available” mentality.

I can write gadgets for iGoogle so why not Gmail? Security would have to be tightened so that only apps the user expressly allowed could be run, possibly including some kind of vetting process by Google, but this could endlessly extend Gmail and, if also able to edit the look and feel of Gmail, could create countless new themes.

Theoretically, adding this feature could make all of my other issues go away over time…

2. Connectivity With Other Services

Ok, Gmail is pretty flexible here. I can email someone or IM them, if they use Google Talk or AIM. Nice. But what if I want to call them? I can’t do that in Gmail, even though it already integrates Google Talk chat, it doesn’t include calling features.

Ok, fine. But what if I want to Twitter them, Facebook them, Myspace them, etc. I have to leave the site. So many sites offer brilliant APIs that Gmail does not interact with. It doesn’t even integrate with Jaiku, a product Google actually owns.

Gmail needs to stop thinking in terms of just email and IM and open up to all of the ways that people communicate. It can be a communications hub, not just an email service/client.

1. Tabs

I don’t get this one. iGoogle has tabs, Chrome has tabs and they are joined by a slew of other Google products that have embraces the goodness that is tabbing.

Why not Gmail?

This is one of the few areas where Gmail actually lags behind Yahoo!. Yahoo’s mail product has long supported tabs, ever since the new version came out, leaving Gmail users to wonder what is taking the big G so long?

Here’s the problem. Say that you are hammering out a long email and you realize that you need to either A) Research something discussed in a different conversation or B) Get a phone number from your contacts. Either way you have to save your draft, open up the search box and find what you’re looking for.

There is no way to do two things at once in Gmail without opening up new tabs or windows in your browser. That is stupid and downright counter-productive when you’re working on something lengthy, doubly so when it requires you to do research in your email account.

Tabs, even just one for reading mail, one for composing and one for contacts, would be a HUGE leap forward.

Seriously, can we get on that, now that you’ve pushed out templates, themes and signature fixes?

Bottom Line

I love Gmail, I want to make that clear, whether I am using it in my favorite email client via IMAP or the Web-based interface, I do like Gmail. Sure, I may gripe as a Google Apps user when I feel a bit shortchanged, but no one seems to have been able to create anything better.

But that is the crux of the Gmail problem. It isn’t that Gmail is so incredibly awesome that angels weep whenever they look at it, it is that the bar has been set so low that Google, with a relatively mediocre effort, was able to leap over the bar and then do a dance on top of it.

While all of that is well and good, the problem is that it wouldn’t take much for someone else to knock them off of their perch. Gmail got where it did by rethinking the email experience but, unless they keep rethinking Gmail, the next evolution will unseat them brutally.

All it takes one start up with a good idea and Gmail will become the next Hotmail…

Apparently, they had been listening and working on many of the problems for quite some time, just very quietly (perhaps they were also hunting rabbits).

But is it everything that I had hoped for? Well, not quite. However, it shows a great deal of promise and has a lot to offer for us Opera outcasts that have been pushed to using Firefox, Safari or Chrome because of how incomplete the Opera offering has been.

So what’s new and how well does it work? Here’s my breakdown of the latest features and how well they perform.

Inline Spell Checking

When I read that the new version of Opera FINALLY introduced inline spell checking, I literally jumped for joy. I had been dying for this feature for some time and have been enjoying testing it. For the first time, Opera is finally a browser capable of handling my email, blog posting and other work-related tasks that take place in the browser itself.

However, the early iterations of spell checking are a bit disappointing. In fact, as I type through this post in Opera, it doesn’t catch words that I misspell as I type them. Rather, it seems to catch them some time later, often times after I hit “save” on the post. This is unlike Firefox or Safari, which check the words right after I hit space.

While that isn’t bad per se, it is annoying and it forces me to go back through everything I write a second time to make sure I didn’t miss any squiggly lines. It is not terrible by any stretch and it is much better than what Opera did have, but it still doesn’t bring it up to parity with Firefox and Safari.

Still, it makes it at least usable as a browser for work-related tasks and that is the main goal for me right now.

Improved Performance

According to Opera, their new browser is 30% faster on the “real Web” (as opposed that darn fake Web the other browsers routinely surf). With it’s new Presto 2.2 engine it is indeed much faster than 9.62. It’s smooth, renders everything that I use regularly well and seemed to handle most complicated sites with ease.

That being said, according to download.com, it is still not the fastest browser, at least on JavaScript. Though the improvement in JavaScript performance is remarkable, it doesn’t quite tip it past the latest builds of Firefox.

Still though, the speed improvement is very noticeable and it works remarkably well. Even though the benchmarks put it behind other browsers, I can’t notice any extreme difference between the three, something I could before.

In short, it may not beat Firefox, but it at least is a viable alternative now, something it wasn’t before.

Mail Client Improvements

The email client also underwent some minor improvements. Though I lamented the state of the client and am glad to see it get some love, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.

The addition of HTML email is… ok. It is debatable whether this qualifies as a feature though. It had always been able to view HTML email and sending it doesn’t really add that much to me. Granted, I don’t send much email that even asks for HTML formatting, but I really don’t think most users need or want this feature. I just turn my Gmail formatting off and use text exclusively.

Though I am glad to see them thinking about the mail client some more, the fact is that the client is still kludgy, especially with account set up, and doesn’t feel robust enough for daily use. Still, I am going to try it out for a few days and see how it works, that is something that takes longer than just browsing around to really get the feel of.

Standards Compliance

I said it before that I don’t care what your score on the ACIDX test is, I just want my sites to work. Being standards compliant is great, but it is more important to be forgiving and able to work with sites that might not be perfect.

The new version of Opera seems to do that a bit better. Errors that I saw in previous versions are gone and even high-intensity sites work well. It’s hard for me to really hammer this point home without a few more days of trial, but it seems to me that they’ve finally figured out how to be both tough and forgiving on standards issues.

Other Items

I’ve noticed a few other odds and ends that, at the very least, I didn’t see on the previous versions of Opera.

• Memory Usage: On my Mac, the new Opera seems to be neither stingy nor bloated in the area of memory usage. After being up most of the day with many dozens of tabs opened and closed, the browser is currently using about 300 megs of memory. That puts it on about par with Firefox or Safari on their good days.
• The Phantom Bar: I’m noticing that, (sometimes) when I do a fast scroll, a faint grey bar appears on the screen to mark the previous location I scrolled from. I can’t get a screen shot of it as it disappears quickly, nor can I make it come up reliably, but it is there. Not sure if I like it or not.
• Issues While Loading Pages: If the reload button has been turned into the stop button, meaning that the browser is loading elements of the page, Opera is almost useless. The scroll wheel does not work, hovering over a link does not produce the hand icon and the browser seems to shut down until the last bits are downloaded. Frustrating at times, but made worse by the fact that it seems to keep trying to load elements long after it is clear to rational people it isn’t coming.

All in all though, these are issues and bugs that one might expect from an early alpha release. Still, despite it’s status as a test build, it has remained remarkably stable, not crashing on me even once after two full days of use. In short I’m impressed.

Conclusions

Many will point out the obvious about this Opera release, that the new features are just designed to bring the browser up to parity with Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The new features, for the most part, are just catch up releases and don’t really add anything new.

This is true. It is also true that Opera is still behind in other areas including extensions, speed and privacy.

However, Opera has always had something of an upper hand in other areas. A secure browser with a built-in mail client, good theme support (no need for a restart) and a robust user experience without the aid of extensions.

Opera’s desktop browser may not be as popular as Firefox or even Opera’s mobile cousins, but it is a solid browser with a lot of good cause to check it out.

It isn’t for everyone, it never has been, but it is now my default browser. That is, until I decide I’m tired of it and switch back to something else…