> "Is it simply that webmail is good enough for most people?"
I'd say there's a healthy chunk of people who find it way better. They see webmail as having better security [1-3], portability [4], usability [5], and even speed [6].
I know a lot of client fans cherish their offline access, power features, and speed [6].
But I don't think it's fair to dismiss either side as "just satisficing," there are legitimate perks to value on both sides of the ledger. These perks may be just balanced enough that it's difficult to add "monetary cost" to one side of the scales without shifting preferences.
[3] Family tech support in the early 2000s. Viruses hopping into every damn address book. I have not lost the grudge, even though things are probably much better.
[4] You can use webmail on a random library / friend's / work computer without an install (not that you should)
[5] Webmail means never having to say IMAP (or POP)
[6] This last bit may seem like a contradiction, but each group can find speed improvements in different ways. Time into interface? Webmail. Interface responsiveness? Client. The former is a big win once per session, the latter is lots of little wins throughout a session. Faster machines can improve time into interface, webapp responsiveness is harder, but has made some progress (probably as hard to acknowledge as it is for me to see security improvements).
I wholeheartedly agree, but I'm still curious how come there are no better Webmail clients. Most are either old-fachioned (like Roundcube) or tied to a proprietary service (like Gmail), but I don't see much effort going into cool, Sparrow-like webmail clients, either open-source or commercial. Or have I missed something?
I think that's a large part of the reason so many email clients are poor in rendering support. At least mobile/tablets have come around, but there is a lot of bad stuff going on in webmail (specifically Gmail) and desktop clients.
Admittedly, I do not understand this position. With all due respect, you're not living in reality. The reality is that email already is this "complicated thing like the web". The proliferation of myriad screen sizes from mobile to tablet to desktop, and current industry trends with respect to "responsive design" dictate modern front-end developers to adapt and mimic as close to desktop-level support as possible.
For those that do, in my opinion, this type of mentality can be viewed as short-sighted and non-constructive to the platform as a whole.
Your voice is professional and reasonable, but your skill with words cannot conceal the fact that what you are wishing for in this thread is bad for the world because it would tend to make it less secure, less reliable, less predictable and more tedious for people to continue to use email to exchange plain text and simple attachments like images with their friends, employers, customers and suppliers. Things that are easy now (at least for those like myself who send and receive mostly plain text messages) like selecting an extent of text in an email with a pointing device (e.g., to copy it), searching for a string in an email ("find in page") or saving a message to a file or a note-taking application like Evernote will become more difficult and less reliable just like happened on the web over the last 15 years.
couple of quick points, but first a joke: Spoken like a true operations guy :p (tongue-in-cheek, rimshot)
1) I wonder if you'd be in the room as Tim Burners-Lee was inventing the IMG element, describing to him the security implications and why it's a nonviable component from a support perspective. I wonder if you would describe his new invention as also "bad for the world" just because it has implications for you job?
2) The technology is already built. Slapping a common modern rendering engine into your email client with your own custom tweaks is just so easy. A quarter of your job is already done.
3) As I said, you're not living in reality. I completely understand your workflow, because it mirrors my own (right down to the Evernote detail).
However, you're just a minor subset in the holistic view of the email ecosystem. There is real pressure from stakeholders and users for great looking email. There are entire industries whose only job is to make email look nice. And yes, even beyond the table of geniuses in the Marketing department, there is actual value in nice-looking email.
I also take it that you've never sat in a meeting with Marketing where they are asking "why can't our email just look like our website??". And then you think about it, and you realize it's an entirely reasonable question.
4) If you're doing it right, you are sending a plain-text version alongside your HTML version. In my view, it's a necessity.
5) Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for rendering engines to figure out how to search for Strings while ignoring intervening markup.
6) Why do you, and so many who think like you, believe that email should always be the bastard step-child of the web? Honest question.
>Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for rendering engines to . . .
It might be exceedingly trivial in theory, but in practice what happened on the web is that those "style: fixed" elements that remain in the same position within the window when you scroll often (usually?) obscure the string you are searching for when you use "find-in-page (i.e., Edit > Find). In other words, when "fixed" elements or whatever their proper name is were implemented, the browser makers did not do the work to make sure that users can still see hits when the users is using find-in-page.
Moreover, a few years before the introduction of fixed elements, find-in-page started to mystify me during searches by landing on (what I guess are) invisible occurrences of the search-for string.
What is your point, other than pedantic nonsense? Who cares that email came before TBL's WWW. In terms of current support for modern technologies, as proselytized by everyone's favorite web consortium (W3C), email clients' support is abysmal. If you want to pretend that the first agent to a system will always have the best solution, through virtue of chronology, be my guest. It's a silly and losing proposition.
I do as well, and believe that intimate person-to-person contact is solely the domain of SMS. But Email still has it's role, whatever you think of it. And part of that role is delivering complicated structured markup with modern design principals.
And as of now, because most of the pillars of the industry don't quite care much about their products, developers are reduced to using 90's/early aughts techniques like table-based-layouts and inline CSS to support the old, shitty clients.
For instance, in Outlook 2010, Microsoft actually downgraded their rendering engine. They used to use Trident in Outlook 2007, the engine behind Internet Explorer, which wasn't even very good at the time relative to it's competitors. And yet, it was TOO good for email apparently, as Microsoft decided to switch to the HTML rendering engine they had built for MS Word, instead of Trident. This dropped support for several common web features, and generally solidifying the idea that creating documents for email would be a PITA.
It is what it is. Not a huge deal, it's just email. But all things being equal? It's a ridiculously lousy platform if you want anything to look good across an array of email clients. It's basically like the Browser Wars at their max, only it's a series of de-escalating moves. To continue with the war analogy, it's like Mutually Assured Horrible Rendering where companies are lazily sauntering to their positions of keeping rendering bad.
Again, I understand nobody really cares, but if they did, I'd say support this: http://fixoutlook.org/. And to be fair, as bad as Outlook's 2007/20010 fiasco was, Gmail's CSS support is absolutely horrendous in it's own right. Obviously the webmail vs desktop discussion is it's own thing.
I'd say there's a healthy chunk of people who find it way better. They see webmail as having better security [1-3], portability [4], usability [5], and even speed [6].
I know a lot of client fans cherish their offline access, power features, and speed [6].
But I don't think it's fair to dismiss either side as "just satisficing," there are legitimate perks to value on both sides of the ledger. These perks may be just balanced enough that it's difficult to add "monetary cost" to one side of the scales without shifting preferences.
[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/pr...
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/thunde...
[3] Family tech support in the early 2000s. Viruses hopping into every damn address book. I have not lost the grudge, even though things are probably much better.
[4] You can use webmail on a random library / friend's / work computer without an install (not that you should)
[5] Webmail means never having to say IMAP (or POP)
[6] This last bit may seem like a contradiction, but each group can find speed improvements in different ways. Time into interface? Webmail. Interface responsiveness? Client. The former is a big win once per session, the latter is lots of little wins throughout a session. Faster machines can improve time into interface, webapp responsiveness is harder, but has made some progress (probably as hard to acknowledge as it is for me to see security improvements).