"Walter Prins" <wpr...@gmail.com> wrote
a) I sometimes use Gmail while we visit folks in South Africa who
are still
on 56k dial-up. Initial log-in can be a bit slow, but generally
you'd be
surprised at how efficient/quick it is w.r.t bandwidth.
To be fair to Google, GMail is one of the best implemented web mail
systems around. If you must use web mail then I'd go with Gmail
over Yahoo for example.
the amount of mail I receive on a daily basis, using a conventional
"download then read" client on a 56k dial up link would be totally
impractical for me,
I've used a desktop client for the last 25 years, even over a 1200
baud
dialup modem. Because it downloads in the background you rarely notice
the delays. My volumes have increased in the 30 years but only from
about 30-200 mails a day, my bandwidth OTOH has increased by
much more! :-).
b) Gmail does a lot of in-browser caching,
Sure, as I say GMail is one of the best but the cache times out and if
you
read older mail it does download it afresh. I regularly reference mail
from a year or more ago.
c) As the web matures the trend towards web-applications being able
to store
data locally and run off-line should increase, further improving
bandwidth
Absolutely, but that requires the programmers to intimately understand
the impact of their internet usage. Which is the point being made by
Steven and myself. Its not a dig at Web mail per se, its the fact that
as programmers we need to understand exacvtly what is going on
over the network and its potential impact - and not just on the
immediate
user but those users potentially sharing the network.
c) Stating the obvious but you can turn downloading of images off by
default
in your browser, which will of course further reduce the actual
bandwidth
I used to do that when I had Mosaic running over 9600 baud, but after
I got to 56K I turned them back on - especially when web designers
started
sending text as graphics (to get fancy fonts) and did so without using
alt tags!
d) Using Gmail means you don't waste bandwidth unneccesarily
downloading
mails with big attachments (PDF files, Word files) unless you
actually want
Most desktop clients can either only download headers and fetch the
body
on demand, or download headers and body but leave attachments till
later,
or download everything. On my mobile phone I go headers only, on my
work
PC I get everything and on my home PC I get headers and text.
e) Actually having access to your email from places you wouldn't
normally
have access to it (on holiday, at conference) is a benefit you don't
neccesarily have with a conventional client.
No, and this is where webmail is genuinely useful.
I have 6 email accounts and all of them have a webmail inteface but I
fetch
all of them into my desktop client. But if I am on holiday and don't
have my
PC then I use webmail to keep abreast of things. I'm not against Web
mail,
I just recognise that its not a network efficient way to read email.
I absolutely agree about programmers having to be aware of the
bandwidth
costs involved with every operation they do, as bandwidth isn't
free.
However, the internet is after all, a network, and the argumentation
ostensibly against web based services (especially potentially
relatively low
bandwidth ones like gmail) on the basis that they consume network
bandwidth
per-se, seemed a little OTT to me. YMMV.
I don't think anyone is arguing against these services. Cloud
computing is
almost certainly the future. But as programmers - and this is a
programmer's
list - we need to be aware of and understand how apps use the network
and how we can minimise the adverse impacts.
And as responsible internet users we should recognise the negative
impacts our usage habits can have on our neighbours, in much the
same way as drivers need to recognise the impact of bad driving
on other road users. Email is, as someone pointed out a relativel
small consumer
of bandwidth, much worse would be somebody leaving a streaming video
source on auto repeat! But having said that the latest figures still
place
text services as about 50% of all internet traffic, so every little
helps.
--
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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