Gmail 2.0 - wave of the future?

A few days ago, Google rolled out a new version of Gmail that offers a few interface enhancements. One thing I immediately noticed was that the “Loading…” warning that appears when you first request the page has changed from Times New Roman to Arial, and it’s margin has increased. Aside from that though, the changes to the email writing and browser interfaces seem minor, if not undetectable. The interface for Contacts has changed considerably, and seems to mimic OSX’s finder window, with three vertical panels in a row.

What is really noteworthy about this application deployment is how heavyweight it is. It takes much longer to load up front, the Contacts screen takes about as long as a traditional page request, and most importantly, it crashes Firefox under a number of different circumstances. It seems that we have reached a point on the web where programs (websites) are taxing the operating systems ( browsers) to the point of failure. This is an issue that has been alive on the desktop for as long as I’ve been around, but it is pretty novel in terms of the web. It seems like a an important milestone for a few reasons.

There has long been a retail computing hardware gap between such “lightweight” tasks as word processing, email, web browsing etc. and “performance” tasks like CAD, graphics, video editing etc. It has been assumed that if you’re just poking around on the web, you don’t need the fastest processor and huge amounts of memory to do that because you’re not really doing anything “serious”. I think Gmail is the first in what will be a long line of web applications that is going to raise the bar on what is considered the minimum hardware to use.

Following that trend, I think Gmail is leading the way for a true shift from desktop applications to web applications. While Google has been at this for some time with its various document services and data rentention, the fact that Gmail is going to force browser developers to improve their Javascript engines will lead to heavier web apps for many parties.

Much has been said about the shift from desktop to web, and I’ve probably just parroted a lot of it here, but the new Gmail interface seems like a real trailmarker on the path forward. When they make a documentary on Web 4.0 that goes to independent film festivals, I guarantee there will be an unknown engineer who says that Gmail started it all.