I've finally been invited to the Yahoo! Mail Beta after being on its waiting list for so long that I can't even remember since when I started tracking the developments! I thought my favorite site had ditched its most fanatic devotee. What made the wait more acrid was Rajat's invitation to the beta long before mine.All is forgiven! The beta has indeed lived up to its hype and I must say the interface is absolutely stunning, closely resembling those of standard mail clients. Strangely enough, IE7 is not supported, though the site clearly states that IE5.5 and above are supported!
Anyway, I switched to Firefox (I was trying IE today after a long hiatus) and Yahoo! Mail worked flawlessly. However, I have good reason to believe Yahoo! Mail Beta's interface will be soon matched feature-for-feature by Microsoft Live Mail. Their interface is being build on similar promises and the preview (available only to a select few...Indian accounts not allowed) seems to be equally good. There's also news of Microsoft creating a special mail client that supports multiple Hotmail/Live mail accounts along with standard POP3 accounts. Hotmail and Gmail loyalists (count me in!) would find this hard to resist.
Oops...almost forgot! The new interface supports RSS feeds originally placed in My Yahoo! too. So that should help you do away with conventional newsreaders or even web-based newsreaders like Google Reader, which has been very buggy.
Turning my attention to IE7, there are some anomalies I've come across. If the taskbar is fairly full and IE needs to create another task (assuming an instance already exists), it'll create the task...and also make the previous vanish completely from there. That it! The previous IE window just vanishes into thin air! This may be a nice way of encouraging people to use tabs (a novelty in IE7), but isn't this too harsh on unsuspecting people?!!! In any case, some windows (like blogger comments) cannot be opened in tabs.
The other anomaly is that the characters simply don't appear on the screen as you type them in the Blogger Create Post text area! The cursor keeps moving forward, but the characters simply don't appear there! Publish them...and lo! There're there!
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Our Gods, I must confess, are a fetish lot! And pleasing them is an easy task-just chant some mantras (sacred hymns) and the job is done. Nepotism reigns supreme over Indian skies!