If you view Web Mail over a dialup connection, you may have noticed a change lately. For about a week now we've stopped serving graphical banner advertisements when the page is viewed over dialup, and replaced them with light-weight plain text ads. Right now this is a test, but it may lead to a permanent change.
We've debated the whole advertising issue in other threads on this blog already and I know lots of users wish they weren't there at all. But one common complaint from dialup users is that graphical ads slow things down. Even though we load them last after the page is visible and clickable, some users are still affected. So now these new ads are loading about 10 times faster than before. In our tests over dialup they only take a couple seconds, instead of the much longer time that some of the graphical banners would take.
If you're a dialup user and you have noticed a difference, I'd like your feedback. Please leave comments here. We'll also be running a formal survey in about another week, which will be linked from the login page and ask just a couple questions about the dialup experience. Please also participate in that and let us know what you think.
You should see something like this if you are on a dialup connection:
If you don't see text ads on dialup, we want to know that too.
UPDATE
The survey is up now, please click here to fill it out.
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