Gmail Puts Another Nail in the Coffin for IE

Michael Davidson, on the official Gmail blog:

One of the lesser-known features of Gmail is its ability to help with multitasking. Frequently, I find that I need to find an old message while I’m composing an email. When this happens, I click on the “new window” icon to pop my compose area into its own window.

There’s only one problem — it’s been slow! Today, we’re rolling out a change that will fix this (reload your account to make sure you get this change). Now, popping out a window is much, much faster. No more “Loading…” progress bar.

[...] Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you’ll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, or Google Chrome.

Between the massive user base of the generic Gmail product, and the mass exodus to Google Apps for Education, this should be a significant blow for Internet Explorer. I’d argue that most people will only switch browsers if they’re given a good enough reason, and a better email experience is a pretty damn compelling reason.

I have philosophical problems with everyone using a single rendering engine (Safari and Chrome both use WebKit, as do most of the mobile web browsers on the market), but Mozilla has been slacking with their Gecko engine lately (which is used in Firefox) and Trident (used in IE, among other things) has been a plague upon the ‘net for far too long.