We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.

The Power of Word in Outlook

How do you want your e-mail experience to look like in the next five years? If you think Microsoft is on the right track, take no action. If you think they should switch to modern standards, send a tweet asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet.

Or just switch to a better e-mail program.

The site was created to demonstrate what will be possible to do in Firefox 3.5 using open technologies. That is, technologies that are part of web standards like JavaScript and HTML — not proprietary plugins owned by single companies like, say, Flash.

As many people know, Flash is by far the most popular plugin on the web today, where the most obvious example of a website using it is YouTube. Replacing Flash as the technology for playing videos on YouTube with modern, open web standards would actually be very straightforward. The only catch is that there are too many people using old browsers that are not supporting these web standards yet, like Internet Explorer.

One way of solving this would be if everyone switched to Firefox 3.5 as soon as it’s released a few weeks from now. Or, web sites could be designed so that both Flash and Open Video formats are supported during this transition period when people are upgrading their browsers. Incidentally, that’s exactly what SUMO will do…

Anyway, I’m really impressed with what’s possible to do on the web today using just standards. My hope is that web developers will start to utilize these new, powerful, and fully open technologies to accelerate the advancement of the web even further.

My favorite technology demo so far is Content Aware Image Resizing. It just blows me away that a thing like that is possible with just JavaScript!

Be sure to upgrade your browser when Firefox 3.5 is released. Not just because it will be the fastest Firefox yet, but because it will make the whole web better.