[Update, Nov. 7, 2008] Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We ARE listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

Hey, there! I’m Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager for Hotmail.

As we roll out the newest release of Windows Live Hotmail, I want to talk a bit about what kind of performance improvements we’ve made, and how we made them.

I also want to talk about our decision to combine the old “Classic” and “Full” versions of Hotmail into a single experience that we think will work extremely well for all our users.

First things first – we’re fast

No kidding – we’re fast! We made the new Hotmail much, much faster than the old “Full” experience. The “Classic” experience was already lightening fast, but we made the new Hotmail a wee bit quicker even than that! Compared to the old “Full” experience, loading a new messages is about twice as fast. It’s faster to sign in, too. In fact, we picked out the most common things your do on Hotmail and made them all faster. The following chart compares four common tasks and how long each one takes when you do it for the very first time in both the old and new versions of Hotmail. The times shown in the chart are the average page load times across a lot of different environments and are normalized. Shorter bars are better!

But wait! It gets better! Your browser actually caches (saves) a bunch of stuff that Hotmail uses (images, code, etc.). So, it turns out that each of these goes even faster after the first time you do it.

The second chart shows a comparison of the same tasks after you’ve done them at least once (for instance, reading a second message; or signing out, then signing back in). We made getting to your inbox and reading messages smokin’ fast!

Merging “Classic” and “Full”

In our last release of Hotmail we actually had two different versions. “Classic” was aimed at people who wanted a lightweight experience that looked a lot like, well, classic Hotmail! “Full” (or “Rich” as we sometimes call it) was aimed at people who wanted the whole kitchen sink – every feature we could think of. “Full” was most useful for folks with very fast Internet connections, since all those features take time to load in the browser.

When we started developing this new release, we asked ourselves an interesting question: What if we built a single user experience that starts out clean and simple, but lets people turn on new features when they want them?

The experience would have to feel familiar to our “Classic” users.

It would have to feel powerful to our “Full” users.

It would have to be easy for all our users to discover new features.

And it would have to be fast. Really fast.

How did we do that?

First, we decided that most of the “Full” features could simply be options that users can turn on whenever they want. For example, the reading pane (one of my favorite features) is turned off by default.

But using the Options menu, you can display the reading pane on the right or the bottom of the Hotmail window. Users coming from “Classic” will automatically have the reading pane turned off, while “Full” users will retain their reading pane setting from the previous version of Hotmail. 

We also decided to make a whole bunch of improvements to the Contacts pages. “Classic” and “Full” users will both find lots of new features here. For instance, when you click a contact to view their details, along with the usual stuff like e-mail address, phone numbers, and whatever other info you entered about that person, you’ll also see other useful information about them, like recent messages you’ve exchanged with them, or (if you have their address) a link to a map of that address. You can even send a contact a quick e-mail message without leaving the page!

The page you use to compose a new message was quite a challenge. We love the auto-complete feature from “Full” and we love the favorites pane from “Classic.” In the new release, we figured out how to get the best of both worlds.

To use auto-complete, just start typing the name of one of your contacts in the To: line, and Hotmail automatically starts filling in matches from your contact list. Try it! On the other hand, if you want to quickly get to your favorite contacts, you can still bring them up easily by clicking the To: button, and then clicking the Favorites tab. 

But how did we keep it fast?

In the old days, it was pretty easy to make a website fast. In Web 1.0 it was all about “page weight” – that is, the sheer number of characters that had to fly across the Internet from our server to your browser. Every click brought in a new page, and most people had fairly slow connections. So we spent a ton of time making the page as “light” as possible.

You might ask, “What’s the problem?” Well, the problem was that we wanted to add a bunch of cool new features that were going to make the page “heavier.”

Enter AJAX… and lots of performance tuning

The great advance of the Web 2.0 world was a cool thing called AJAX. “AJAX” just refers to the technologies that can be used to make websites more interactive. Using AJAX means that you don’t have to go fetch a whole new page with every click; instead, you just go fetch the parts of the page that need to be updated. That’s better (and faster) because, typically, most of the page hasn’t changed.

For instance, in Hotmail when you use the reading pane and you click a message in the message list, we just go fetch that new message and pop it into the reading pane instead of downloading a whole new page. Most of the page – the header, the folders, the message list – hasn’t changed at all, so we don’t bother to fetch that stuff again.

Our team spent a lot of time optimizing the Hotmail experience to make it as fast as possible. We used all kinds of techniques – everything from tweaking arcane server settings, to doing aggressive edge-caching, to delaying the download of parts of the user interface until you need them. We’ve learned all the ins-and-outs of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and how to get the most out of them. We’ve learned a great deal about the world’s networking infrastructure and how to best take advantage of it. And we’re measuring our real-world performance all over the globe to make sure we understand the experience that our users are actually getting when they use Hotmail, no matter where they are.

We think improving download speed is some of the most important work we do. We hope you agree! And we hope you like the new user experience, whether you’re coming from “Classic” or “Full.”

Enjoy!

- Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager for Hotmail

[Update, November 7, 2008]: Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We ARE listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

[Update, November 25, 2008:] Check out this recent blog post for updates about the bug fixes we're making in repsonse to your comments.

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