I’ve been quiet lately — been busy. And have some cool new Playsta­tion games. And, the roof’s going on our house. And, some­one sent me a Gmail invite (thanks again, Mark!).

Aster­isk is ask­ing, “What’s the Big Deal with Gmail?”. Apart from the fact that I have an account and lots of peo­ple who don’t have one want one (kid­ding… well kinda), I’m here to tell you it is good. Google have man­aged to cre­ate a web­mail inter­face that’s actu­ally fast and use­able, as much so if not actu­ally more so than a reg­u­lar desk­top mail appli­ca­tion. No really.

I decided to try and quan­tify the dif­fer­ence. I’ve had a Hot­mail acount since 1996 or 1997 (when did it start, anwyay?) and I don’t really have a huge spam prob­lem because I only really use it for newslet­ters. And most sites are switch­ing to rss now so I’d pre­fer to use that. But any­way, I logged into my hot­mail account and saved a list­ing page out (there was no mail in my inbox at the time, btw). The files that Fire­fox down­loaded totalled 115KB. Of this, about 20K was script and css files, which would get cached in the browser, and 10K was inter­face graph­ics, which would also get cached. The HTML file itself was 20K. Gaph­i­cal ads made up 42K.

Now, Gmail. I logged in, and have five “con­ver­sa­tions” in my inbox. Total size of saved page, a whop­ping 383KB. Yes, that’s right kids, the fastest web­mail client in the west is over three times as large as the lum­ber­ing MS beast’s own dev­ilspawn. But wait a minute. Of that, 39.4KB is inter­face graph­ics which would be cached. Over 300KB is cached script files. The HTML file and some iframe source which seems to hold the mes­sages add up to a pid­dly 4K.

Now, look­ing back at this highly sci­en­tific explo­ration, I know that the num­bers don’t actu­ally add up to the adver­tised totals. I don’t really care — it was meant to be a quick exper­i­ment. I could tab­u­late it all up. I could log into Dave’s Yahoo account and try it there. I could try and make it more accu­rate by hav­ing the same num­ber of mes­sages in each inbox. What do you think I am — some crazy geek with noth­ing bet­ter to do with my time?

Don’t anwer that. Bot­tom line is, Gmail rocks — about 4K actual repeat load­ing time com­pared to about 60K. And that’s before we start talk­ing about the funk­i­ness going on in that 300K of JavaScript, which lim­its the num­ber of unnec­es­sary page reloads and makes man­ag­ing long mail­ing list threads a breeze.

I’ve given out all my invites and the next few are already spo­ken for, so please don’t ask. If I have get more than I need, I’ll be sure to post ‘em. But Google seem to be ramp­ing them up, so I’m sure they will be even eas­ier to get hold of real soon.