Sudo Byte

To me, Zimbra doesn’t in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook [Footnote 4]. On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel (screenshots). Do I prefer the Gmail look and feel over the Zimbra look and feel? Yes. Why? Because over the past twelve years, my mind has developed a very specific model of how a web application should look and feel, and because Gmail aligns to this model, I can immediately use it and it feels natural to me. Gmail uses Ajax to accelerate common operations (e.g. email address auto-complete) and to enable data transfer sans jarring page refresh (e.g. refresh Inbox contents) but its core look and feel remains very similar to that of a traditional web page. In my view, this is not a shortcoming; it’s a smart design decision.