The good point, you get a window that’s dedicated to e-mail without any other distractions, which many people find useful. But you keep all the benefits of GMail. It doesn’t add any new dependencies or breaks anything, strictly nice to have. If only it worked with Firefox…

When it comes to traditional Office 1.0 suites, I’d like to see more nice-to-have options for things I really care for (like text, code), and use Office 2.0 for the rest (spreadsheets, presentations).

I agree. Standard Office 2.0 setups should work without extensions, but users should be free to complement them with whatever will make them more productive, be it browser extensions or traditional Office 1.0 suites that are required for some specific use cases.

I love the tab preview extension. It uses SVG, a standard supported by Firefox but not IE. Do I stand in front of the line, or wait for all the major browsers to play catch up?

SessionSavers and LiveMarks are both features that the browser should do (and Firefox 2.0 will). They just prove these features are necessary, and are available today. Since they hook into the Firefox code base, standards alone won’t make them portable.

The only reason for Office 2.0 to not require extensions is to reach a wider user base. But shouldn’t users be able to pick the best tools that make their life better?

Let me start with a little narrative titled “Monkeying with Greasemonkey”.

A few months ago I’ve decided to contribute to our Web community by programming a Web 2.0 initiative — a tool that will ease reading web pages and search results by utilizing one of the foundations for Web 2.0: the IT crowd.

A Public/Community Web Marker: The main idea was adding a feature to the web browser which will enable users to highlight what they think is worth highlighting for later personal use. In the background a centralized service will save, publish and integrate the highlighted content to produce a public heatmap Web page.

Without further ado, My experience with Mozilla’s DOM was a torment, this is why I believe Greasemonkey, with it’s limited functionaly, is nothing more than a code candy.

-Harel Gal a.k.a. Enrico

I don’t claim to be an expert on this in any way, but I think I have a potential solution to the problem. I had to put it on my blog as it is rather lengthy being written a little late at night. Here it is.

In summary, it uses a third-party service as a registry for online Office 2.0 applications, enabling the Client Applications (email or whatever) to write to a single interface to interact with any possible user-preferred Editor Application (e.g. word processors, spreadsheets, etc. from different vendors).

I think it is compelling for both the Client Applications and Editor Applications, as well as for the provider of the Online Application Registry. I’d be interested in your thoughts and comments on it.

It is not going to be technically perfect at this stage, but I hope it is useful to at least spur some really smart people to come up with a good answer to the problem!

Cheers
 -Phil