The Windows Live team announced today that they’re rebranding their new email beta to Windows Live Hotmail. We haven’t written about the application for some time, and this is as good an excuse as any to compare the current release to Gmail and the new Yahoo mail beta.

The three applications, along with AOL mail, make up the vast majority of the 500 million or so webmail users around the world (see chart included in this post). Most of these users are still using the old, tedious, Ajax-free Yahoo Mail and Hotmail user interfaces, requiring page refreshes for every click. The new applications, along with Gmail, offer a much richer experience, much like Outlook or Mac mail. When these webmail clients are performing well, their speed and ease of use is easily as good as a desktop client.

Overall we prefer Gmail over all other webmail applications because performance (speed) is consistently fast, and emails can be tagged making search much more effective. They also offer more storage and other features, and it’s free. However, Yahoo and Live Hotmail offer more mainstream Outlook-like user interfaces (although Live Hotmail does not allow you to access other email accounts from their application), whereas Gmail takes some time to get used to. If you are looking for speed and tagging is important, Gmail is for you. If you are looking for the closest thing to Outlook online, go with Yahoo Mail.

The following chart compares the services on a feature-by-feature basis. Note that the user numbers for Yahoo and Hotmail include legacy users still on the old platforms.

Gmail

Gmail groups emails in a thread into a single line in the inbox. Some users love this, others hate it. It’s not my favorite feature, but I’ve gotten used to it. The best Gmail feature in my opinion is the ability to tag emails for better organization and search. None of the other services offer this. Gmail also has integrated Gtalk into the GMail interface, and continues to add other functionality as well (such as integration with Docs & Spreadsheets). Gmail is consistently fast, offers the most storage and free POP-in and POP-out, meaning you can use Gmail to access your other email accounts, or access GMail from whatever email client you use. It’s a near-perfect piece of software, and has only occasional hiccups. The fact that Google is paired with Google Calendar, the best online Calendar application, doesn’t hurt, either.

Windows Live Hotmail

The new Windows Live Hotmail will be a welcome change to Microsoft’s 228 million webmail users, but it falls short of the Yahoo and Gmail offerings. They offer 2 GB of storage, better than Yahoo, but there are no POP-in or POP-out features at all. If you want to access your account outside of the web site, you have to do it via Outlook or Outlook Express. It remains the slowest among the three in our tests.

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is very good, allowing users to access other email accounts (POP-in), but only offering POP-out access for an additional fee. This is probably due to the legacy users who are already paying for this feature - Yahoo may not want to give up this revenue stream. Storage is on the low side - only 1 GB, which is less than half of what Gmail offers. Still, Yahoo Mail has recently been running very fast and offers an intuitive, Outlook-like interface. Instant Messaging and RSS integration is awesome.

Since the relative demise of Netscape as the last serious competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) three years ago, most of us simply take our Microsoft browser for granted--warts and all. Virtually every Web site is optimized for IE, and every copy of Microsoft Windows sold includes a version of IE. And with total market saturation come opportunists: criminal hackers who use Microsoft vulnerabilities to take control of your operating system, steal your identity, or spread spam.

But out of the ashes of Netscape came the Mozilla Organization. Spun off from AOL, which purchased Netscape a few years ago, the Mozilla Organization has been quietly creating a brand-new Internet browser from the ground up--and sharing its code with anyone and everyone. The benefit of this new browser project is that unlike IE, this open-source code runs independently of your operating system, so a flaw in the browser software won't necessarily expose your entire computer.

Another source of Internet vulnerabilities lies within ActiveX technology, tiny scripts that automatically download when you visit certain Web pages. In most cases, they're good, adding music or animation to a page. But in some cases, criminal hackers have tweaked the code to damage your computer. Microsoft recently added a prompt to IE so that you can accept or deny ActiveX scripts. Firefox doesn't use ActiveX technology, which means that a few Web sites might not appear as their designers intended (although we were hard-pressed to find a site that didn't work because of this during our testing of Firefox).

While Mozilla offers a whole suite of secure, independent, open-source Internet tools, it recently streamlined its browser component and named it Firefox. Since last summer, we've been testing Firefox, and, frankly, we're sold: Firefox is just as fast and just as easy as Internet Explorer--and more importantly, it's much more secure.

And feature by feature, Firefox either matches or surpasses IE.

*Going forward, Microsoft will upgrade only the versions of Internet Explorer running on Windows XP SP2. The last standalone version of Internet Explorer 6 will work on versions of Windows up through Windows XP SP1.