Surgeweb is the high performance web based user interface for surgemail users.
It's core design goals are to provide a modern web email interface that is:
This page describes some of the things you should know about surgeweb,
particularly compared to the existing netwin webmail. For starters this is what the default interface looks like:
Login page | Main interface |
Why is it better? Here are some key features that may convince you:
SurgeWeb is setup with three interfaces:
The ajax interface is the primary interface and uses modern web2 / ajax techniques to do much of the communication with the server in the background so that you do not have to wait for the server to respond to each request. You do need a relatively modern computer (approx less than 5 years old) to make effective use of the Ajax interface or it will appear sluggish as the client side processing will be slower than the server roundtrip delays. In the case of older computers it is recommended that the Basic (HTML) interface be used. The surgeweb Basic interface is much faster than the equivalent old Webmail HTML templates.
The use of either SurgeWeb interface uses less bandwidth that the old webmail templates. In addition to this http compression is used on all requests to the server reducing the bandwidth usage even further. The Ajax interface does have a slightly higher initial bandwidth requirement than Basic interface, and Basic interface does have a slightly higher ongoing bandwidth requirement than the Ajax interface.
There are also some nice features to make use of higher bandwidth if it is available. One of these is inbox caching. SurgeWeb will download the first page of messages in the inbox and cache these client side for instant display when when a user selects a message. This can be optionally disabled (useful for people on modem lines) or messages in other folders can be optionally cached for instant display. This means the end user experience when dealing with messages that are cached is as responsive / if not more so than a normal desktop email client.
In addition to the design goals mentioned above, work on SurgeWeb has concentrated on making SurgeWeb a reliable and maintainable email client - most importantly when it comes to HTML messages.
Surgeweb is actively developed and we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
The NetWin team :-)