I’ve been using the new version of Hotmail for the past couple of weeks. And it sucks. That’s not a very professional sounding review comment, but that just sums it up.
It’s many times slower than it was before. It gives me scripting errors on slower systems. It’s so script intensive that on slower systems like Intel Atom based desktops (that are more than adequate of normal computer work) can seem to lock up on occasion due to whatever it is doing in the background. They rolled MSN Messenger into it and turned it on by default (a privacy tip from the Face Book handbook) and it took me a while to figure out how to even go Offline or Invisible on this new web based version of Messenger. It isn’t the least bit intuitive. You have to click on your user name in the top right hand corner, which doesn’t even appear to look like a click-able button or link.
So once again Microsoft has taken a usable and decent product and created bloat-ware, and something I dislike using. And if there is any way to go back to the old or classic version, it’s not apparent to me. Google has rolled all sorts of products into Gmail, and it doesn’t seem to be as sluggish and computer intensive as Hotmail is now.
Does anyone remember Hotmail before Microsoft acquired it? How it was basic, just worked, was reliable, and everyone on the Internet used it. Plus back then it ran on Unix servers, and was faster than when Microsoft bought it and moved it to presumably Windows servers. Back then they made the news cause over night it went from great to unreliable and slower. And now it is bloat-ware that doesn’t even refresh properly when I want it to.
Good job Microsoft, I guess I’ll be ditching it for a Google product. At least they seem to know how to write a web application. But you guys (MS) can keep throwing the kitchen sink into Hotmail, cause I won’t be seeing your ads any more, I’ll be looking at even more Google ads.
The new Hotmail gets a 1/10 rating.