Yahoo trumps Google. Wait, what?

And MS acknowledges Opera. What the hell is happening today?
by AC - permalink

If you haven't heard yet, Yahoo! has begun an invite-only beta test for a completely revamped Yahoo! Mail service. From the early reviews, it seems to be the first web-based email client that actually gives you as much control as a desktop client. As you can see in this monstrous pile of screenshots courtesy of Zilla Smash! (no more !'s in this post), the new Yahoo Mail gives you a standard 3-pane UI, like Outlook Express or, more accurately, Thunderbird.

And it makes Gmail look charmingly antiquated. Not all new features have been integrated into the beta, so final judgement is withheld. It would be nice if Yahoo finally started offering free POP3 access. There are ways around it, of course, but they should be unnecessary.

But here's the really interesting bit (to me, anyways): the new service works in all major browsers within Windows and, I believe, Linux. But according to Macworld, it's only supported on the Mac in Firefox. This may be a peculiarity of the beta, or more likely an inaccurate report, because Safari is actually more standards-compliant than Firefox, and if it works in Firefox, it should also, in theory, work in Camino.

Google, meanwhile, has launched a beta Blog Search tool. Not surprisingly, there are already search forms all over Blogger.com. I noticed a few days ago that we're now at least partially indexed by Google, and we show up in Blog Search as well. However, posts older that this past June have not been indexed. I'll stick with the Yahoo site search form for now.

Going back for a moment to wider acceptance of alternative browsers, BetaNews, among others, reported yesterday that Microsoft has finally opened up its download center (MSDN) to Firefox and Opera. Just those two for now, but it's a start. Of course, Windows Update is still off limits unless you're willing to open up Internet Explorer. God help you.

And finally, if you're hesitant to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for fear of it being incompatible with your extensions, you can follow Bugzilla Bug 307381. In the comments, active extension authors are reporting when their respective extensions have been updated to comply with the new branch. All it generally involves is changing the maxversion tag to 1.4 (I know, it's confusing), and crossing one's fingers that something in the new Fx code doesn't break it. In any case, it's a safe bet that these guys will also make sure their stuff will then work with the final build of 1.5.