I remember gmail before it used AJAX. In many ways, I miss that interface - it just worked. Sure, I didn't get real time email notifications, but come on, it's email. Sure, there were a lot of page refreshes, but they were super quick since there wasn't several MB of scripts being parsed and run with each load. Just some HTML with a few JS interactions.

They even still offer that interface - check it out. It works remarkably well (and quickly) to this day.