A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)
Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:
- Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
- Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready
No wonder people are heading into the cloud.
Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):
- Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
- Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds
Interesting.
yeah, but thunderbird is a massive pile of shit. It is easily the worst of the major email clients. Outlook (with 2 or 3 gigs of mail) just snaps open for me.
I switched because I had a lot of problems with Outlook 2007, esp with IMAP. Is 2010 better?
http://www.geekrant.org/category/applications/ms-office/outlook/
I dont use IMAP, so i would not know. I do know that I did try it with our hacked up mess of a random linux box hosted mail system for work and it was having problems, but that was most likely the server. (We are upgrading it to exchange this week though)