There were plenty of webapps before Gmail. There was even plenty of other webmail services before Gmail and Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo. I've been using webmail since 1997 and even my University had a web interface (SquirrelMail) for those who preferred using the web interface (almost everyone). This was pre Gmail.

Really? My recollection is that Gmail was substantially different in the extent to which it was an in-browser Javascript app built around server-side data requests. That's in contrast to something where applications were a series of mostly-static pages.

At the time this change was known as AJAX, and GMail is listed as a pioneer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

Squirrelmail, by contrast, rendered a new page for most user actions. Especially the viewing of messages.

My recollection was that Outlook's Web Access was the first. IIRC, it used what would become XMLHttpRequest when it was still internal to Microsoft, so it's the first of what we might consider to be modern web application. GP's 1997 seems right on, though, since that was the first release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web#History_2

Microsoft invented AJAX specifically for Outlook Web Access so yes that is in fact the first "modern" web application.

As I recall there was a fight about getting it in and the creators called it XMLHttpRequest because XML was the hotness at the time and that got it past the project managers and PHBs.

GP cites Squirrelmail, which definitely was not AJAXy. And still isn't, I'm pretty sure.

What I mean was:

-Webmail was already established as a "thing" when Gmail came out, even in Universities.

-Gmail wasn't particularly special from a UI perspective and was comparable to other offerings at the time.

-There was plenty of other web apps already that weren't Google products. In fact, I, personally, was writing one at the time GMail came in out.

Sure webmail had been out for a decade before GMail. But I believe the point was that Gmail was special in that it was a pioneering user of AJAX-style interactivity.

Pre-AJAX, web-based services were just a series of forms, and the interactivity patterns harkened back to "smart terminal" [1] form-based use for mainframes in the 1970s. I believe the user you were responding to uses "application" to mean something approximating the desktop application experience of the 80s or the current mobile app experience.

So the distinction they're drawing is about the kind of interactivity. Squirrelmail, et al, were a series of forms and pages. GMail didn't do a new page or frame load every time you looked at a new message. UI rendering and interactivity became client-only activities, with the server providing an API.

[1] now known as block-oriented terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block-oriented_terminal

> Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo

GMail was different because it offered an outlandish 1GB of mail space, when everywhere else you got 1-10MB mailboxes. Since it was launched on April 1st, most people did not believe it at first. And (at the time) huge space allowed users to keep and search all old email, instead of deleting old emails being a weekly chore.

I meant from a UI/UX prospective.

Pine

Everybody here is too young to remember the era of the Microsoft monopoly and how much it sucked. The Web app era is much nicer. Besides Web Apps aren't bad compared to the 90s win32 api which was closed source and riddled with bugs and undocumented behavior.

20 years is forever. Nothing should be this bad after 20 years.

There where webapps being built before gmail. We did Ajax-like things in 1999-2000. But gmail was possibly the first slick implementation.

I remember how impressed I was when Google Maps was released. Instead of having to click on arrows to reload the page with a new map, you could just drag and it would automatically load new map tiles!

Google Earth (the native application) is really old and abandoned by now, but its still better than the new "web" version that only works in Chrome.

How did gmail back then differ from hotmail or Yahoo mail? I was using both in the late '90s/early '00s.

Gmail was first massively used single page web application. Somewhat ironically it was built on top of technology meant for Outlook Web Access (ie. XMLHttpRequest as ActiveX component in IE and as an DOM extension in Gecko). AJAX is name that was conceived to describe that approach to webapps, with the somewhat funny fact, that google at the time described it as javascript (from time to time with the addendum: "done right")

Funny thing about AJAX is that this acronym means nothing. Asynchronous JavaScript? Well, JavaScript was always asynchronous. And XML? What does it have with XML?

XMLHttpRequest originally was intended for posting and getting XML which was automatically parsed and exposed on the response object.

Now of course we are using more JSON and XMLHttpRequest is being replaced by Fetch API.

AJAX means Asynchronous Javascript and XML.