14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has finished rolling up an update to Windows Live Hotmail delivering major performance improvements. In fact, the refresh would qualify more as an upgrade, especially considering that it got Windows Live Hotmail to break the instantaneous speed barrier.
Think of the instantaneous speed barrier as the sound barrier of the online application ecosystem. It’s a Holy Grail mark, which, once broken, will deliver the feeling that a Cloud app is performing instantaneously all user actions.
0.2 seconds – this pretty much qualifies as the instantaneous speed barrier. Anything below 0.2 appears to be instantaneous to users. With a consistent evolution across various aspects, including caching, preloading, and asynchronous operations, Windows Live Hotmail has broken this limit.
“We trimmed content on our pages to speed up download time, and we eliminated a network round trip on login for further gains. But our goal was to make Hotmail feel instant, and we knew that speeding up downloads would only get us so far towards that goal. Even with today’s broadband speeds, the network is the bottleneck, and we needed to keep our customers from experiencing that latency,” said Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager, Hotmail.
“The approach we decided to take was to get user data closer to the browser, and when the data is not available on the browser, get it there more efficiently, without the user noticing. We also decided to take advantage of modern browsers like Internet Explorer 9 to be more app-like, by doing more work in the browser and less on the server.”
The new pre-loading feature of Hotmail is yet to be enabled in all markets worldwide, but the rest of the improvements are already live.
The results speak for themselves. In June 2011, Hotmail users can open a message in 0.18 seconds, can delete a message in 0.14 seconds and start writing an email after hitting the compose a new message option in as little as 0.2 seconds.
By comparison, in December 2010, the same actions took 3.3 seconds, 3.1 seconds and 4.3 seconds. The promise from Microsoft is that it’s not going to stop here.
“The new Hotmail is more app-like, because we now cache information after it’s downloaded. The message list is stored in the browser’s DOM (Document Object Model), so when we need it, we don’t have to download it. We also cache the email that you’ve read, so we can re-open the message nearly instantly,” Craddock explained.
“In the new Hotmail, while you’re reading one message, we automatically download and cache the next one in the list. (…)In addition to pre-loading messages, we also preload code and data in the browser. For instance, we know that most Hotmail sessions involve sending email. So while you’re reading and deleting email, we download and cache the JavaScript and HTML code and address book data that you need for composing a new email message.
“The new Hotmail no longer waits for server responses for most operations before updating the UI. In the new Hotmail, when you delete a message, Hotmail updates the message list instantly, and you can resume working right away. In the background, client code queues up actions and calls the server to delete the email. So email still gets deleted, but without the wait.”