Fortunately, I rarely use my Google GMail account.

Because for about a month or so, I can’t write replies in my preferred browser anymore. I can only guess it’s due to some broken browser detection done by Google - my preferred browser is Epiphany, and uses XulRunner. So it’s the same engine as my Firefox, and I can write replies with Firefox (but the Firefox UI is not as nice as Epiphanys, and it uses more memory).

(Well, almost. Epiphany is Gecko/20070209, whereas Firefox is Gecko/20070208. So either some change in this one day breaks GMail, or Google broke it themselves with some stupid browser detection; many people still think it’s sufficient to check for ‘Firefox’ to detect all non-IE users. Please use the engine ID, that is Gecko.)

Anyway: if I’d be a heavy Google Mail user, that would be a desaster for me. Broken for a month now and counting!

Fortunately, I don’t rely on that friggin’ Ajax stuff; I can either use the standard HTML version of GMail or use Firefox. I’d just like to emphasize that Ajax apps break much easier, and your users might be unhappy about that. Ajax is far from perfect, but an ugly hack.

Don’t overuse it.

[Update: I fixed my GMail issues by switching the language to German and back to English. Weird, huh?]