New UI and Possible Rebrand for Hotmail

Hotmail’s 10-year-old front end has been slated for a major redesign in 2006, and the service might get a new name as well. Code-named Kahuna and currently in testing with a small number of users, the redesigned service is slated to offer faster performance, a more intuitive user interface, more storage, and better integration with other MSN services, such as Messenger and Spaces. These improvements will help Microsoft’s e-mail offering compete with Google’s Gmail and new services from AOL and Yahoo.

Built on Ajax

In July 2005, MSN released Kahuna to several hundred beta testers. The service offers a completely redesigned Web mail interface built on “Ajax” (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), an increasingly popular set of technologies that allows developers to create interactive Web applications with relatively fast performance. In particular, users are not forced to re-download the entire Web page each time they perform an action that changes the data they want to view (for example, selecting an e-mail message or moving a cursor on a map). In addition, because all the major browsers have built-in support for Ajax, users don’t need to download plug-ins, as they do with other interactive technologies such as Macromedia’s Flash or Java applets. Google built its popular Google Maps service with Ajax, and MSN is informally testing a customizable home page, Start.com, that uses Ajax.